Rockbox Development > Starting Development and Compiling

Paging file in rockbox?

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zajacattack:
Not sure if this is totally crazy, but would rockbox benefit from using a paging file on the hard disk (or flash memory, depends on player) that serves as extra memory? Or would this be more of a pain that a gain? If so, why?

Llorean:
Something like 80% of the RAM in the player is simply used to buffer audio. This is to prevent spinning the disk up and down repeatedly.

dreamlayers:
Paging requires a memory management unit, and most targets don't have that.

If paging was used actively, the hard drive accesses would spin up the hard drive a lot and use a lot of power.

What might make sense instead is if Rockbox had various modules which were loaded from disk.  For example, there might be recording, settings, playlist editor and playback modules which are loaded when needed.  However, like Llorean says, there is plenty of RAM, so this probably wouldn't be worth it.  Even on HWCODEC targets with 2 megs you probably wouldn't gain much.

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