Tiny Core and xhci support

[homoludens]

Hi There

Thanks btw for this great flexible little distro!

I am about to purchase a usb 3 flash drive which offers read speeds up to 70 Mbs in order to improve my boot times for TC (I boot TC from a usb stick).

I have heard that xhci support was merged in the 2.6.31 kernel. Can I assume that TC will support the xhci controller and be able to take advantage of the improved bus speeds during boot up?

I have an Asus MB with two usb 3 ports and am looking at either the A data superior series or Transcend 700 - both 16gb sticks.

Many thnx.

[curaga]

Yes, the xhci module is included in the base. It's possible your controller is too recent though.

[Juanito]

I am about to purchase a usb 3 flash drive which offers read speeds up to 70 Mbs in order to improve my boot times for TC (I boot TC from a usb stick).

I'm not sure this will speed things up noticeably on boot. There will be a certain delay to allow usb devices to be recognised and once done the file size to be read from the usb device is relatively small.

I have heard that xhci support was merged in the 2.6.31 kernel. Can I assume that TC will support the xhci controller and be able to take advantage of the improved bus speeds during boot up?

From config-2.6.33.3-tinycore:

Code: [Select]

CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD=m
# CONFIG_USB_XHCI_HCD_DEBUGGING is not set


[homoludens]

Thanks for that. I use TC as a platform for running cloud apps and have had to extend the base system a fair bit to optimise it for my machine. That includes the Xorg system and the nvidia driver.

Hence my optional folder has reached around 120mb in size with additional extensions while my mydata file is around 24mb.

Also browser caches contribute further to file bloat so an improved read speed from stick at boot time (I'm hoping) will perhaps improve performance. It would be interesting if any other TC users have had experience of this I think. Of all the small systems I have tested (slitaz for example) TC has proven the most flexible for use with a usb flash drive.

Many thanks again for a great distro.

[curaga]

24mb backup? Yikes, you might want to add browser caches to xfiletool.lst, and check whether the biggest files do need to be there.

[homoludens]

It is mainly cache with chromium the biggest hog.

A few mb are taken up with cursor/icon theme.

I have symlinked the cache for firefox 5 from the home directory to a directory on the root of the partition but am reluctant to do it for chromium. Obviously using cloud apps generates a lot of cache with chromium but excluding from backup will affect the performance of the apps as the cache is crucial to speed in some cases. Once configured though I I generally choose to shut down without back up. It's swings and roundabouts I guess.

[curaga]

You could consider packing the cursor and icon themes as extensions, and not have them in backup.

[homoludens]

Hmmm hadn't thought of that. Just mksquashfs up the relevant directories into an extension.

That'll help a bit. Thnx.