I got a shinny new bbb today… havent stopped playing with for the last 9 hours… so im kind of tired.
I have a BBB runing debian 7.2 from a 8GB micro sd.
all is working fine with debian, its running headless at the moment which is fine with me. when I installed the debian image to the sd card, there was some space “at the end of the card” that I wanted to reclame. I did a little poking around and some thing is a … odd. I could use some input. i am not a total noob but im by no means an expert with linux.
I ran df -h to find what was used and where
that looks fine… then I ran fdisk -l to see what i could see. I am not quite sure how to interprate this
1 how does /dev/mmcblkboot0 and mmcblkboot1 not cotain a valid partition table? what does that mean exactly? how does this boot without a valid partition?
2 why or how, does the sd card boot start at 2048? and use a fat12? I have never even heard of a fat 12 file system…
3 given the boot is starting where is it, and the 2nd primary is about 3.6gb? I have a bout 3.7ish GB to make a partition out of? I think 8gb sd is relly 7.39ish?
please double check my math.
how big should I make swap? I used to double the ram back in the when you always had a swap disk… but most boxes today have so much ram there is no need and it has been like a million years from the last time I have worked with something like … this … small… or with something that has this amout of resoruces:)
1 how does /dev/mmcblkboot0 and mmcblkboot1 not cotain a valid partition
table? what does that mean exactly? how does this boot without a valid
partition?
It's a new feature of the "eMMC" spec, it's not utilized by current am335x
silicon... Just ignore...
2 why or how, does the sd card boot start at 2048? and use a fat12? I have
never even heard of a fat 12 file system..
2048 was set by the creator..
fat12's been around for a long time, just not normally used today:
3 given the boot is starting where is it, and the 2nd primary is about
3.6gb? I have a bout 3.7ish GB to make a partition out of? I think 8gb sd
is relly 7.39ish?
You used someone's "4GB" image, just extend it with gparted..
please double check my math.
how big should I make swap? I used to double the ram back in the when you
always had a swap disk.. but most boxes today have so much ram there is no
need and it has been like a million years from the last time I have worked
with something like .. this .. small... or with something that has this
amout of resoruces:)
It depends on your application... Just remember, flash wears out, using
swap definitely doesn't help that issue..
my purpose for this device is to run a filtering proxy server for my home. I have kids with different needs and different levels of filtering. I had not considered flash wearing out. My understanding is that it would take years. But I had not looked in to the matter. I think it will use micro sd card till have a working solution. Then consider where I put what partitions.
Do people using the BBB with SD not normally use a swap partition?
my purpose for this device is to run a filtering proxy server for my home.
I have kids with different needs and different levels of filtering. I had
not considered flash wearing out. My understanding is that it would take
years. But I had not looked in to the matter. I think it will use micro sd
card till have a working solution. Then consider where I put what
partitions.
Depends on workload, for a simple proxy you don't need it.
Do people using the BBB with SD not normally use a swap partition?
With 512Mb of ram, for most applications users don't need swap. So review
your workload.