From: Garrett Derner <GaryD_at_AdFreeInternet.com>
Date: Sat, 24 May 2003 22:28:07 -0500

From: "bob smith"
>Hi
>
>I read about you new patch on the mailing list-and am
>glad to hear about it.
>
>How about adding one more thing though? Devote a
>little more ram to it. Currently it's only loading 1k
>and reading a file actually takes more battery life
>than listening to music because the drive keeps
>spinning up about every minute.
>
>I few months ago I read an entire book on my archos,
>but would typically choose to load the archos firmware
>before reading as it loads much more into memory.
>
>I think 4k would be much nicer, or even just two.
>
>Thanks

Hi Bob, good question. Hope you don't mind me taking it back to the group
(keeping your e-mail address private in case you prefer that).

AFAIK I cannot use much more RAM for the time being. We do not do
malloc/free; any buffer increases the size of the binaries. We are already
up very close against the 200k limit for a boot image. That will change one
day with Rockbox 2.3 and loadable applications. (At that time also I would
guess the developers might choose to implement a buffered fread().)

Of course I agree that even a small buffer increase would help, so maybe
that will be possible.

Like you, I have noticed the frequent spin-ups when reading a lengthy text.
I would like to be able to do something about it.

One thing that puzzles me: doesn't a hard drive have its own built-in cache?
Why does it need to spin up every time I read a couple sectors? The built-in
cache is for write only?

Garrett
Received on 2003-05-25