#1 Linux 2.4.21 vanilla kernel patch

[John Richard Moser]

It works. I had to apply some of the patch by hand
from the .rej files. I've tested it, it seems to work
fine for 2.4.21 kernels.

Word of caution: I've altered the damn thing a bit.
You don't have a double-size bool anymore; instead, you
have a choice of:

PAGE SIZE:
Single
Double
Quad
8x
16x
32x
64x

Major caution here: 64x performs inferior to 32x,
because it has a lot of failed alloc's. ALSO, when it
hits up of 200 failed alloc's the system simply halts
violently--I THINK. It might do other nasty things on
other machines. I've seen 37% average on 64x (same as
double-size IIRC), and 43% average on 32x. I hit >200
failed alloc's in about 10 minutes running X with
gnome2 on 256 MB RAM.

32x is prone to far less failed alloc's (been running
all night, have 51 now), and thus gets better ratios
because it's managing to actually compress things now.
However it's getting some and that does NOT look stable.

I recommend 8x or less, although I'm going to try for
16x here in a minute. I don't feel like scanning
through the source and trying to find each usage of
COMP_PAGE_SIZE and hacking it to use a kernel command
line option, but I think I have a way to do that easier
and will look into it. I'll use COMP_PAGE_SIZE_DEFAULT
instead, and define COMP_PAGE_SIZE to point to a global
external variable. This variable can be set at boot
before the driver is activated. You can clean up the
cruft behind me.

--Bluefox Icy

[John Richard Moser]

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I've located the issue, now please locate the problem.

It appears that failed alloc's only cause a lowering of the
compression ratio. If you avoid failed alloc's, you get a
better ratio. I think 8x should do fine but I've yet to test.

It is FATAL to use this patch with framebuffer! Make sure
you only boot to a maximum resolution of 80x60, no
framebuffer. Otherwise, when switching to text console or
between text consoles or anything, you run the risk of
freezing up very quickly. There may be some relationship
between the number of failed allocations and the crash, but
I don't know. I think it's best to not use a framebuffered
mode with this.

[John Richard Moser]

Logged In: YES
user_id=696610

I'm not sure what's breaking it, I think 2.4.21 is just
broken. I'd like to later tack on dictionary size tweaks
(WKcommon.h I think it was called) and such, and also, I'm
unsure how that whole __setup thing works and how to get
things from the kernel command line. I'd like to be able to
tweak the page size order, dictionary size, and words per
page from the command line.

Avoid switching terminals. Period. Update this patch to
2.4.22 ASAP please, like the day 2.4.22 comes out.