Quote Originally Posted by kl522 View Post
But there is actually an easier way to accomplish the "nowear" thing, is to ask operating system to be lazy on writing to flash. Here is one write up of such thing :-

http://www.cyrius.com/debian/nslu2/linux-on-flash.html

I thought this is a more elegant solution than to mimic the operating system behaviour in userspace.
As far as this mostly is about OS behavior, I fully agree. But I don't think that is the whole story. We have a lot of proper user space tasks resulting in many disk writes, furthermore, use of ramdisk can speed up running from flash sticks a lot. I also don't quite see that a nowear options has to be that much of an ugly hack, and in the actual use situations, we will mostly have more free memory to use in the time to come. (Because of games requirements and cheap RAM.)

At the very least, I think it is worthwile having a few users testing a clean implementation of it. And using a similar solution for things like databases could also be effective: We could, for example, aufs-mount a compressed ro part, a rw part from a disk partition and a ramdisk. Today, aufs won't let us use the compressed part, when that comes from something already aufs-mounted.