Swap Hint

[BradicaL]

Running Ubuntu or Yellowdog in PS3 is really cool. But one thing may make you pull out a bit of hair is the low RAM. This is what is good about the SWAP partitions in Linux. I was playing around with swaps and setting them up all day. I'd been getting tired of waiting here and there for stuff while PS3 was busy. It pissed me off cause it's a beast of a machine but its slower with linux since sony has locked a lot of crucial stuff out. But there is way around that.

What I wanted was to make a USB memory 2GB thumbdrive into additional swap. It proved to be very troublesome. I did manage to get it working but I made a mess of everything else. So I re-installed and realized in the partitioner at the start of installation. Make the USB drive a swap partition at the same time as the installation. It was such a great idea that I went and gathered a CF card 512MB, SD card128MB, and a Memory stick 512MB and put them all in the ports in my fatty PS3. I also put in 2X2GB USB thumbdrives. All of these memory devices I catagorized in the partitioner as SWAP partitions.

OMFG, lemme tell you. The PS3 is way, faster having this setup. It reads/writes from all drives at the same time. (i can tell by the access lights) Overall I was very impressed with the speedup. Before I was like wtf is with this. Once I looked into the RAM or lack there of. Then researched SWAP and ways to make SWAP faster. The way I have setup my swap is to have 6 swaps.

1. PS3 HDD 500MB SWAP
2.CF slot
3.SD memory slot
4.Memory stick slot
5.and 2 USB sticks

EDIT:There is also another trick for making your RAM parimeters faster I just enabled it now. It's called the VRAM SWAP. Usung the RAM out of the graphics chip that isnt used by default in any of the linux's. Since I figured this out then I changed my fash drives to just in the ports. So 3, a CF card, an SD card and a Memory Stick. I have them all Partitioned in half so I can use the other half in the XMB. That is a really nice feature also. Since more than a few GIG's its overkill for flash swap.

Enabling ps3vram
Open up a terminal window
run the following commands:

sudo mkswap /dev/ps3vram
sudo swapon -p1 /dev/ps3vram

swapon -p1 means sets the priority higher than the hard drive swap, so Ubuntu will leave the hard drive alone until all other memory is used.

Now lets see if that worked by using another command:
swapon -s

The result should be simmilar to this:

greg@Playstation3:~$ swapon -s
Filename Type Size UsedPriority
/dev/ps3da5 partition 489940 97140 -1 <-- Hard drive swap
/dev/ps3vram partition 250872 12241 <-- Vram swap

Mounting the swap at boot (Ubuntu 9.04)
You might already have noticed that as soon as you reboot your system your precious vram swap is gone, don't worry there's a solution to that. By slightly modifying a post made by JMS that can be found here.

Open a terminal window
Note: instead of "gedit" you can use "nano", I prefer gedit as you can place the cursor where you want to type instead of using the arrow keys. You can install gedit by running the following command "sudo apt-get install gedit"

sudo gedit /etc/modules
add "ps3vram" at the end of the file

save the file and get back to the terminal
sudo gedit /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh
scroll untill you see these lines of code:

# Don't run bootclean again after this!
rm -f /tmp/.clean /var/run/.clean /var/lock/.clean
}

Now by adding the following:
mkswap /dev/ps3vram
swapon -p 1 /dev/ps3vram

make it look like:

# Don't run bootclean again after this!
rm -f /tmp/.clean /var/run/.clean /var/lock/.clean

mkswap /dev/ps3vram
swapon -p 1 /dev/ps3vram

Again save the file and reboot your system.
When you're back go to "System > System monitor" and check your swap, it should be boosted to 722MB!

Again, credits go to Gregford and JMS.

Mounting the swap at boot (Ubuntu 9.10)
Open a terminal window
Note: instead of "gedit" you can use "nano", I prefer gedit as you can place the cursor where you want to type instead of using the arrow keys. You can install gedit by running the following command "sudo apt-get install gedit"

sudo gedit /etc/modules
add "ps3vram" at the end of the file

save the file and get back to the terminal
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
scroll untill you see these lines of code:

exit 0

Before add the following:
mkswap /dev/ps3vram
swapon -p 1 /dev/ps3vram

Save the file and reboot your system.
When you're back go to "System > System monitor" and check your swap, it should be boosted to 722MB!

Credits go to Civilian http://psubuntu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=8227#p8227∞