Benefits of Flashing?

[mlind]

I understand that the booting gets a little bit quicker, but besides that?

What are the benefits of flashing Rockbox FW into
1) only RAM
2) only ROM
3) RAM & ROM


I get the feeling that only two of the alternatives are suitable...

[nls]

You can't flash to ram, you can however flash a ram image to rom, or as you stated a rom image. A rom image runs directly from the rom and leaves you with a little bit more buffer space (about 350 kbytes) which could give slightly better battery time. To update a rom image you will need to load a ram image either from flash rom if you have one flashed or from the hard disk. If you flash a ram image it will be copied to ram on boot and will run just as a normal ram image loaded from the disk, and (afaiu) you'll not need to load any other image to update it in the flash.

The big advantage however is the faster boot, especially when using dircache, if rockbox is flashed it will not need to scan the disk on boot.

[Rincewind]

and the booting looks better, too. You don't have the text lines from the bootloader anymore, it starts directly with the Rockbox logo.

[Sando]

Booting from ROM is the bee's knees. Playback resumes in just under six seconds it'd probably be even less with the default WPS and dircache off.

edit: I just tried it with default settings except for Resume playback. Playback starts in just 4.8s

[Multiplex]

As I never use the OF on my H320 or H120, and Rockbox seems very stable at the moment  I was toying withthe idea of flashing my players.

I looked round the Wiki and spotted the IriverFlashing page - but that only mentiones the H120/H140 and has a non standard boot loader.

Please can someone point me at some reading and/or offer advice/comments? Thanks

[bluebrother]

The h300 can't be flashed right now.

[Multiplex]

Thanks - that explains why I couldn't find anything, but I thought I'd seen something, maybe it's just wish list still.

Is there any known reason why it can't be done (other than no-one has written the code) ?

[bluebrother]

Is there any known reason why it can't be done (other than no-one has written the code) ?

None that I know of. The problem is that flashing is somewhat dangerous as you can easily brick your player. Thus it's not as "easy" as usual development ...