Comments on: palmOne NVFS Flash Memory Controversy

I would say that one of the most active discussions on this topic is to be found at TreoCentral (http://www.treocentral.com). They have engaged one of the Treo architects in email conversation and he says they are actively looking at the problem, saying "We'll fix it."

The 30% figure quoted in Ryan's article is just an average that seems to capture the problem as a whole. There have been some extreme cases reported that are much worse. One user reported their 300K address book database ballooning to over 1300K when moved from the Treo 600 to the 650. Those little a68k files that are normally around 84 bytes or so on a T3 become 2560 bytes on the 650 (5 records x 512 bytes per record). Of course, for some other files where the record size was already large to begin with the problem is much less, hence the 30% average. Your milage may vary.

Sounds like PalmOne has finally succumbed to a PDA vision equivalent to M$. Future PalmOne handhelds seem that they will all operate as inefficiently as a desktop PC. This NVFS simply acts like a "hard drive" on a PC with all the data swapping etc.
The "Zen" is a distant memory. No pun intended.

Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com

By the way, you can try your favorite application. Use the T5 and Treo650 simulators you can find in P1 website.

No, you don't have to. It's only amusing (and depressing)...

Sketcher on the Tungsten C--87KB Memory Used
Sketcher on the Tungsten T5--174KB Memory Used

Big Ole BLARG

I pledge to the Palm-Powered community that I will seek to make a better handheld through research one day!!!

You people asked for a REAL file system, you got it.

You guys weren't happy with Palm's very efficient database system... and this is what happens.

Get serious. Even though I feel strongly that Palm doesn't need to institute a desktop-type file system for RAM, the current problems all boil down to sloppy execution on Palm's part rather than any intrinsic problems there are with having a file system on Palms. Tapwave came up with their own filesystem solution and no one seems to be complaining too loudly about them. And had Palm spent the extra $10 to spec a 256 MB card, fixed the DataMangler bugs and fixed the backup "issues", the novel memory juggling would never have been mentioned beyond the developer groups. Instead, now we've got everyone - including Zire 21 owners - fearful because Palm has now given up on the three features that used to comprise the best parts of PalmOS: Simplicity, Efficiency, and Stability.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

"Sketcher on the Tungsten C--87KB Memory Used"
"Sketcher on the Tungsten T5--174KB Memory Used"

That is a huge jump! Out of curiosity, if you search through Filez, how many databases are attached to that app? (They should all have the same Creator ID)

When you view the size of the app through the Palm Info screen it returns the size of the app + the size of all the databases it includes.

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Ouch! That's a 3 for 3 hit.

Pat Horne; www.churchoflivingfaith.com

"You people asked for a REAL file system, you got it.
You guys weren't happy with Palm's very efficient database system... and this is what happens."

Nonsense and horse****. This has nothing to do with any file system. For that matter, the 50-odd megs of 'main' memory don't have an FS, so why is that affected? It's just the nature of flash memory.

The PDA2K has got the form factor I've been looking for and all the features... Except for the OS.

The "thing" that I was referring as "Forbidden" is the Windows Mobile software that is installed on that SmartPhone the original poster was talking about.

I pledge to the Palm-Powered community that I will seek to make a better handheld through research one day!!!

Is there any way to give an estimate to just how much extra memory the new method will use up?

If I grab a list of all the files / sizes off my palm and then round up to 512bytes it should give a pretty fair estimate of just how much space it uses in the new ram. Correct?

hmmm... I'll try it tonight and see.

Geez. Would SOMEONE solve this? It can be done very easily, I think.

1) Use a program that can create a DOC file (WordSmith, f'rintance)

2) Create a DOC with just ONE WORD in it.

3) Save it to RAM.

4) Use Filez (NOT Files) to note its size (ie, 1K).

5) Use Filez to MOVE it to Internal.

6) Use Filez to note its size again.

Using FAT on a Memory Stick, that teeny 1K DOC takes up -- drumroll, please -- ** 16K **.

Is it as bad on the T5's Internal store?

There's no question about it, the entire history of the Palm OS "file system" up to this point was based on the performance requirements of the original Pilot from the dark ages of 1996. Since that machine did not have the horsepower---and most important ly, the BATTERY LIFE, to dance around long cluster chains as required by traditional file systems, Palm gurus whipped up the database system we all know and love through Filez. This worked really well for making small changes to flatfile-esqe databases, which was pretty much everything handheld applications needed to do in those days.

Now we want to use our handhelds to read gigantic PDF documents, cut and paste piles of text from one side of a Word document to another, and listen to MP3's that are MEGABYTES long. So the old system would just not cut it. And Palm just picked one of the many readily available file systems to use---probably not for any reason other than the fact that FAT is very common.

Of course, FAT is STUPID for handheld devices, as Mike Cane points out. It wastes lots of space on small files, thusly burning valuable memory and creating fragmented, battery-sucking structures. I don't know if anyone has even designed a file system optimized for handhelds, but PalmSource obviously needs to locate or develop one.

The only question is, as always, will they survive long enough to make this change?

Palm Enthusiast since 1998

The T5 and Treo650 are a testament to technical and managerial incompetence at PalmSource. Those handhelds are faster and more powerful than scientific workstations, desktop PCs, and Macintoshes of a few years ago, yet Palm can't even ship an operating system that reaches the capabilities of DOS 1.0. What's particularly stupid about it all is that PalmSource doesn't even have to develop anything: they could use dozens of open source and/or commercial kernels, libraries, and tools.

These problems were to have been solved by PalmOS 6 (Cobalt). While I feel Palm would have been better off trying to look at the ARM Linux kernel as a potential starting point, Palm had to do something with all the Be engineers they had sitting around. So they used their own kernel and built everything from scratch. While it's nice to try to build a perfect, pretty OS, this takes time - especially given how many features the Be engineers have tried to cram into PalmOS 6 while still maintaining backward compatibility. In short, Palm "overengineered" PalmOS 6, it took too long to arrive, leaving the hardware makers stuck trying to force PalmOS 5 into doing things it has no business trying to do. PalmOS 5 reminds me of an aging boxer that is too poor to retire and keeps having to step into the ring against brutes half his age. The blows to the head are starting to add up and STILL there's no relief (PalmOS 6) in sight. Someone in PalmOS 5's corner should have thrown in the towel years ago...

I found it interesting to hear Dianne Hackborn (one of PalmSource's [ex-Be] senior engineers in charge of developing PalmOS 6) claim that PalmSource only had a few engineers working on their new kernel:

http://www.palminfocentre.com/comment_view.asp?ID=7258
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TVoR
"For PalmOS 6, I had expected that Palm would have been brave enough to think UNIX flavor + pretty GUI + PACE clone (the "emulator" I naively envisioned being folded into the Clean Sheet™ OS) running on modern 400MHz processors. Give 30 experienced engineers 1 year to bind all these elements together. I think it could have (and should have) been done."

Ms. Hackborn:
Easy claims, for someone who is essentially posting anonymously. Tell me, what is your engineering background to be able to make such a statement? Have you thought about these things:

* What the heck do you mean by "UNIX flavor"? Do you know what that is? (Bonus question: do you know what it is about the ARM architecture that makes it very difficult to efficiently implement the traditional Unix process model?) Are you talking about licensing an existing kernel like Linux or FreeBSD? Sure, licensing this stuff makes sense... which is why we licensed STREAMS for our IO subsystem. The kernel itself is a very small part -- we actually have only a few engineers working on ours, not much more than what would be needed to do customization and integration if we had licensed it. Oh and think about this: Be already had a fully functional Unix-like protected memory kernel, one that had been in production use for many years. Cobalt did not ship with the BeOS kernel. Are you saying the Be engineers are so stupid that they just kind-of forgot they had this thing?"
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Neither the Treo 650 nor the Tungsten "5" should have been released with PalmOS 5. But Palm is doing the best it can, coming up with as many kludges, hacks and fixes it can think of to keep things going. Their mistakes seem to be failing to spend adequate engineering resources on prepping PalmOS 5 for its latest challenge and then scrimping on memory in the Treo 650, thereby exposing the weakness of the OS + memory architecture. If Palm lacks the engineering skill to successfully extend PalmOS 5, they should admit this NOW and hire some outside engineering consultants. It would take a couple good people less than two weeks to fix most of the (many) bugs we've seen recently from Palm.

Enough bungling, Palm. Don't throw the fight with PPC.

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Sony CLIE UX100: 128 MB real RAM, OLED screen. All the PDA anyone really ever wanted.

Been reading all the controversy, I bought a T5 before they officially came out, I'm must be unusual because I'm a very pleased user, what a step up from my T/E, my only complaint about the nand memory is they should have put a gig onboard instead of 256mb, I could use the extra for lots of things, and speed wise much faster than my 1 gig sd cards, with the faster ARM processor I'm enjoying watching dvd movies and sorting the huge iSilo libraies I have. I watched this controversy before with Fat to Fat32 upgrade on M$ systems. This is my 3rd Palm I started with a m125, this is such a great increase in useability since the old 8 meg on board 8 meg sd cards. PalmOne needs to quit sweating over Pocket PCs and just keep improving the great products they already have.

Both. They will all be fired when the companies go bankrupt.

"Never give a sucker an even break." (I want to attribute that to Fields, but it might be Barnum. Fetch, Pavlov, fetch!)

Hey, Pavlov, I *know* it was the dog. I've christened *you* Pavlov in irony. You dope. Now fetch, Pavlov. Good doggie.