Finnix Forums » Bugs

Toram broken in current snapshot (1763)


  1. Nazo
    Member

    Just a little head's up. You may already know about this, or I may even have managed to do something or other wrong in my setup (though I can't see what) but, the toram option seems to be broken in the current snapshot. It will load I guess the entire thing into memory but then fail with an error message to the effect that it was unable to load and is falling back to CD mount. As far as I can tell, all the hardware I have tested it on passes as being stable, and I doubt Finnix needs more than 1GiB of memory to load into memory all of a sudden when it never even came remotely close before (what was the official requirement listed as? 192MiB?) so whatever is going on definitely seems a little odd. I have no idea what could be causing it.
    Posted Mon, 24 Jul 2006 23:19:07 -0700

  2. ThomasAH
    Member

    Just tested, toram works for me with snapshot 1763.
    Posted Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:11:08 -0700

  3. Nazo
    Member

    Hmm, I checked again and it did work. I'm pretty sure it has failed on this hardware before, but, more importantly, it repeatedly failed on a particular laptop I was using it on a while back (an Averatec with an SiS chipset I think? It had enough ram, and the processor was a 2800+ sempron, so it was at least the same technology as mine if not even on the same scale when it comes to performance, however, I do have a nForce 3 ultra chipset which is quite common versus a possibly more rare chipset on a relatively cheap laptop.) The laptop is, as far as I have been able to find so far, perfectly stable, albiet with a tendency to get a bit hot (and surprisingly stable while hot -- but I should add that it wasn't hot while I was doing this.)

    Ok, so since the problem is inconsistant, the process itself may not be what I had a problem with. Any idea what conditions exactly cause a failure? I assume running out of memory would be the primary reason, but, what else could do it when a system has at least 512MiB of memory (well, ok, the laptop had 480MiB since 32 were allocated to the video, but the requirements for Finnix say it can run in memory with 192MB, so even assuming the snaphot might be less efficient that's still a heck of a lot of leeway.)

    Most of the time I'm running Finnix off of a flashdrive. The speed probably isn't the best out there, but, more importantly, toram allows me to remove the drive, so even if the problem is specific to a particular hardware or something, I would like to at least try to figure out what happened. Oh, and I haven't changed anything on the flashdrive between then and now (I don't use it so much anymore now that I have an external harddrive enclosure so I don't have to worry about space or speed when carrying things back and forth anywhere I can afford to carry the whole drive with me to.)
    Posted Wed, 26 Jul 2006 06:57:12 -0700

  4. rfinnie
    Administrator

    FYI, toram now works at a block level, and essentially dd's the entire source image to ramdisk. This made management of the initrd code much easier, but unfortunately has a rather sucky side-effect for booting off USB. Namely, if you have Finnix on a 256MB thumb drive, it copies the entire partition, and hence requires >256MB RAM. I'm not the happiest about that, but it made things a lot easier on the CD side of things.
    Posted Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:11:15 -0700

  5. ThomasAH
    Member

    I tested toram again with a CD burned in track-at-once mode instead of disk/session-at-once and now it aborts and fails back to CD mount.
    It would be nice to have TAO mode working, so one could add overlays later in multi session mode.
    Posted Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:02:57 -0700

  6. rfinnie
    Administrator

    Damn, you're right. After burning literally hundreds of CDs during development, I never thought to burn as TAO. testcd doesn't work either. I'm going to have to look at going back to file-based toram/testcd after 88.0 is released (it's too late to turn back on 88.0, as I've already burned many, many CDs for defcon). This sucks, as using block-based toram/testcd was a LOT easier and more elegant. Oh well, thanks for the heads-up.
    Posted Fri, 28 Jul 2006 17:47:55 -0700

  7. Nazo
    Member

    rfinnie wrote³:

    FYI, toram now works at a block level, and essentially dd's the entire source image to ramdisk. This made management of the initrd code much easier, but unfortunately has a rather sucky side-effect for booting off USB. Namely, if you have Finnix on a 256MB thumb drive, it copies the entire partition, and hence requires >256MB RAM. I'm not the happiest about that, but it made things a lot easier on the CD side of things.

    This isn't just a problem for TAO then. A lot of people these days have only 1GiB of ram -- many even just 512MiB and a few unlucky people only have 256MiB -- while flash drives are getting cheaper and cheaper to have as much as 1GiB. Ironically, it costs less these days to get a flash drive than to get the equivalent amount of SDRAM for your PC.

    This would explain why I had the problem on the laptop though. It had about 480MiB of memory free after video sharing. My Cruzer Micro is a 512MB, and even adjusting for the inaccuracies used (eg 1 hype MB = 1000 hype KB which in turn = 1000 bytes -- some day they'll even decide that bytes should only be made of four bits instead of eight) the linux kernel + entire filesystem probably did end up filling up the memory. EDIT: Ah, this also explains why I saw a failure once on my computer but couldn't figure out how to consistantly recreate it. When I left my external harddrive on once, Finnix prioritized it over my flash drive, so booted from the external harddrive. While my flashdrive is 512MB and easily fits in my 1GiB of memory, my external harddrive's 80GB doesn't fit so well. ^_^ I have just tested and this seems to be consistant.

    Actually, I should have figured this out on my own. I had noticed that /cdrom seemed to be a ramdrive now. I mounted it in read-write mode and changed a startup file (finnix.sh) only to find my changes reverted on bootup. Lol, it's so obvious, but, I completely failed to put two and two together here. Anyway, sorry to hear it makes troubles for you. I think I can kind of get a glimmering of what you're talking about in fact, so I can kind of see why that way was so much easier.
    Posted Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:24:36 -0700

  8. Nazo
    Member

    Just wondering if this has been fixed? In snapshot 1947 I tried toram and it still failed. The difference is, this time it failed within just a few seconds, so unlike before it doesn't seem to have been trying to copy the entire filesystem into memory (my current flashdrive isn't exactly the most blazing fast drive I've ever used, so it would have taken a good while before it filled memory and gave up had it done it the hard way that it used to.) If so, maybe this is a new bug? Or does it just try to preallocate or something first such that it would fail very quickly before trying to actually start copying data?
    Posted Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:06:02 -0800