What type of thumb drive For jffs ?

[dvohwinkel]

So the smaller the better ?
It’s just that my RAM is running at 96% now without the ab-solutions etc’ so thought that a swap would help keep things moving. I remember when I used to build my own performance PC’s that they worked well with a 50/50 swap and RAM but RAM was a lot slower then.

FYI remember that Linux will use as much memory as possible for things like buffers, disk cache , etc.. So having 96% ram usage is not necessarily bad as it tries to use the extra memory.

 

[ColinTaylor]

So the smaller the better ?
It’s just that my RAM is running at 96% now without the ab-solutions etc’ so thought that a swap would help keep things moving.

Not necessarily. Remember the mantra "Unused RAM is wasted RAM" . It might be at 96% because you had read a lot of files on your USB drive. The router will buffer the most recent blocks in memory in case it needs them again. That doesn't mean the RAM is unavailable. If another process requests some memory some of that 96% will be freed up. It's much quicker to free up memory blocks than it is to re-read a disk drive.

I remember when I used to build my own performance PC’s that they worked well with a 50/50 swap and RAM but RAM was a lot slower then.

And a HDD is significantly faster than a USB flash drive.

 

[Ragpuss]

And a HDD is significantly faster than a USB flash drive.

That’s what I thought for the swap file.
Can the swap be on a different physical drive than the Entware or Skynet etc’ or do they need to be all on the same sda / sdb drive ?

 

[Ragpuss]

The other thing I just thought of is that I have a couple of old SSD’s 128gb as I remember (cost me a fortune back in the day about 10 years ago) but would they work better that both a pendrive and a usb3 hard drive ?
I would just need to buy a USB Sata enclosure for them (as long as the power from the USB is enough for these) they are cheap enough and that should give me a very fast and dead quiet drive solution.
What do you think ? Any pitfalls ?
Thanks,

 

[accolito]

Pitfalls? No. Bottleneck, yes.
A mechanical HD is not always faster than an USB flash drive. All depends on various hw factors. Remember that swap file, once is created, it's used *only when needed*. You're free to use whatever you want but, to me, a 32 gb pen drive will suffice. One thing you can do to "speed the things up" is to use usb2 for entware (scripts/hosts files and such) and usb3 for the sharing stuff.

 

[Ragpuss]

Pitfalls? No. Bottleneck, yes.
A mechanical HD is not always faster than an USB flash drive. All depends on various hw factors. Remember that swap file, once is created, it's used *only when needed*. You're free to use whatever you want but, to me, a 32 gb pen drive will suffice. One thing you can do to "speed the things up" is to use usb2 for entware (scripts/hosts files and such) and usb3 for the sharing stuff.

Hi, yes, that’s basically what I’m doing now except that I have my samba shares located on the USB3 of my AP and the Entware , etc’ located on the USB2 of my router (both units RT-AC86U)
I just ordered a USB3 caddy for one SSD, only cost £10 so worth a try and will make a good portable even if I don’t use it on the router
Can the swap file be located on the USB3 and the Entware, etc’ on the USB2 or do they have to be on the same drive ?
Thanks,

 

[accolito]

Hi, yes, that’s basically what I’m doing now except that I have my samba shares located on the USB3 of my AP and the Entware , etc’ located on the USB2 of my router (both units RT-AC86U)
I just ordered a USB3 caddy for one SSD, only cost £10 so worth a try and will make a good portable even if I don’t use it on the router
Can the swap file be located on the USB3 and the Entware, etc’ on the USB2 or do they have to be on the same drive ?
Thanks,

Swap file can be generated anywere, however, it's best to have it on the fastest device and if my memory dont fail, if you use adamm skynet firewall, that file will be generated where entware is installed.

This is what I've installed on my system: haveged, dnscrypt and skynet and this is how much swap is used:

accolit0@RT-AC86U:/tmp/home/root# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        440436     404204      36232          0       2312     111572
-/+ buffers/cache:     290320     150116
Swap:       524284       1060     523224

 

[Ragpuss]

Swap file can be generated anywere, however, it's best to have it on the fastest device and if my memory dont fail, if you use adamm skynet firewall, that file will be generated where entware is installed.

This is what I've installed on my system: haveged, dnscrypt and skynet and this is how much swap is used:

accolit0@RT-AC86U:/tmp/home/root# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        440436     404204      36232          0       2312     111572
-/+ buffers/cache:     290320     150116
Swap:       524284       1060     523224

Hi,
I did install Skynet and noticed that it never asked for an install directory, If I were to make the swap using AB-Solution and place my swap, would Skynet then use that one or does it always create it’s own ?
Thanks,

 

[accolito]

Hi,
I did install Skynet and noticed that it never asked for an install directory, If I were to make the swap using AB-Solution and place my swap, would Skynet then use that one or does it always create it’s own ?
Thanks,

That swap file will be generated where entware is installed. You've to modify a couple of files here and there to generate and proprely mount swap on every boot if you want the swap file elsewhere.

EDIT: sorry, I dont know absolution, i didnt read well that part. I think if that script allow you to create swap everywhere then there will be no problem. To check if swap is mounted, use the command 'free' and see if the voice "Swap" is present.

 

[Adamm]

Hi,
I did install Skynet and noticed that it never asked for an install directory, If I were to make the swap using AB-Solution and place my swap, would Skynet then use that one or does it always create it’s own ?
Thanks,

Skynet uses the root folder of the USB drive you selected for installation. After creating it (and asking you for desired size etc) it would have told you this.

In the event a swap file is already installed, Skynet will skip the creation entirely.

 

[Ragpuss]

Hi again all,
Ok so to me this is very odd but maybe someone can tell me if this is normal with Linux on the RT-AC86U router.
If I make ext2 partitions and label them as normal then when trying to instal Entware I will get memory errors saying “cannot hook” then just doing nothing more.
But if I format the whole drive, say sda and then reformat it into the separate partitions, say sda1 , sda2 ,etc’ then it will all work.
The only difference that I can see is that on using blkid the sda also has an allocated volume and then the sda1 , sda2 etc’ have there own labels. Whereas when just formatting into sda1 ,sda2 etc’ blkid only shows the sda1 etc’ and sda doesn’t show.
This only happens when using a usb3 flash drive, if I use usb2 then I don’t need to format the whole drive first.
Should the drive have an initial volume across the whole device first when using them instead of doing a full erase ?
I know that when you buy a new drive it is formatted in fat but I usually delete the entire drive before formatting into the ext2 partitions, is this wrong ?
Thank you.

 

[accolito]

Hi again all,
Ok so to me this is very odd but maybe someone can tell me if this is normal with Linux on the RT-AC86U router.
If I make ext2 partitions and label them as normal then when trying to instal Entware I will get memory errors saying “cannot hook” then just doing nothing more.
But if I format the whole drive, say sda and then reformat it into the separate partitions, say sda1 , sda2 ,etc’ then it will all work.
The only difference that I can see is that on using blkid the sda also has an allocated volume and then the sda1 , sda2 etc’ have there own labels. Whereas when just formatting into sda1 ,sda2 etc’ blkid only shows the sda1 etc’ and sda doesn’t show.
This only happens when using a usb3 flash drive, if I use usb2 then I don’t need to format the whole drive first.
Should the drive have an initial volume across the whole device first when using them instead of doing a full erase ?
I know that when you buy a new drive it is formatted in fat but I usually delete the entire drive before formatting into the ext2 partitions, is this wrong ?
Thank you.

Never done multiple ext2 partitions. Once upon a time I was creating ext2 + swap partitions but nothing similar to your issue happened to me.
This is what I normally do:
partition magic -> boot -> insert drive that I want to format -> using gparted to format/resize/whatever -> apply modifications -> wait -> done.
I never used internal router to format an unit or other methods.

 

[Ragpuss]

Never done multiple ext2 partitions. Once upon a time I was creating ext2 + swap partitions but nothing similar to your issue happened to me.
This is what I normally do:
partition magic -> boot -> insert drive that I want to format -> using gparted to format/resize/whatever -> apply modifications -> wait -> done.
I never used internal router to format an unit or other methods.

Hi,
It does the same thing to me even if I only make one ext2 partition on the usb3 drive, unless it is first formatted as sda or sdb in the Asus web page or by using a partitioner in windows, I then make the partition in terminal for sda1 or sdb1 and it will all work fine but if sda / sdb isn’t formatted first then I will get the errors when trying to install Entware, it’s very odd.
This only happens with usb3, all my usb2 drives work no problem with just the sda1 / sdb1 formatting. As I said the only difference that I can see is that there is then a volume for sda / sdb even though it’s been over written when I check it with blkid.

 

[Ragpuss]

Never done multiple ext2 partitions. Once upon a time I was creating ext2 + swap partitions but nothing similar to your issue happened to me.
This is what I normally do:
partition magic -> boot -> insert drive that I want to format -> using gparted to format/resize/whatever -> apply modifications -> wait -> done.
I never used internal router to format an unit or other methods.

When you say that you used to do a ext2 + a swap partition, didn’t you use ext2 for the swap or would you use something else ?
It’s just that that is what I’m doing ATM on the second drive (different unit from the usb3 problem one) I’m installing Entware just to be able to run a swap file, but I have just made the one partition and am putting the swap file into the same partition as Entware, that is all that is on this drive, then on this unit my usb3 main drive has all of my media on and samba shares.
Then that’s another of my problems in trying to get the swapfile to run automatically on reboot, I followed a couple of instructions but it still won’t start unless I manually start it, something I’m doing wrong, no doubt

 

[MasterBash]

I got a AC86U too. I am wondering myself, does the USB 3.0 speed matters for stuff like Ab-solution, skynet, dnscrypt and pixelserv? I am guessing most of the things are already loading in ram, but I don't know how often it access the flash drive, considering I do have a swap file on it (only 10mb used) but ya.

 

[sfx2000]

And a HDD is significantly faster than a USB flash drive.

And ZRAM is even faster

The AsusWRT kernel is a bit old for that...

All said though, there are SD cards (and I presume USB thumbdrives) that are pretty decent - look at the SanDisk Extreme series for MicroSD cards.

 

[Ragpuss]

Well, I finally found out what the problem with using the usb3 installing Entware and the memory errors was.
Using my iPad !!!!! Gggrrrr
I did it the exact same way but from a terminal on my Pc and it all installed no problem at all.
It’s just strange that from my iPad usb2 would work just not usb3 :/
I guess there is still a lot that you need a Pc for
This time round I decided to make a swapfile first because of the memory error but don’t think it was a problem, anyway I set up the swapfile and all working but after I installed Entware it had deleted my line “ swapon /dev/mnt/*** from the post-mount , is that normal ?
It was no problem to put the line back in but it just seemed odd that it seemed to have deleted the post-mount that I made and then installed a new one ?
Thanks all, just remember , iPads are just for sometimes, not for all times, I know I will, lol
It took me 20 mins today, to do what I have spent all week trying to do from my ipad