Closed Bug 937704 Opened 11 years ago Closed 6 years ago

Make available swap partition on sd by option in Settings

Categories

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: GonkIntegration, defect)

Product:
Firefox OS Graveyard
Component:
GonkIntegration
Type:
defect
Priority:
Not set
Severity:
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

Status:
RESOLVED WONTFIX

People

(Reporter: zrzut01, Unassigned)

Details

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20131022185104

Steps to reproduce:

Typical scenario (which I did): Left IRC client in background, when open web browser on the phone then IRC client was closed.


Actual results:

FirefoxOS close programs unexpectedly when intention of user is to keep them in background.


Expected results:

There should be option in Settings menu to enable swap partition/file on SD card of a phone. The option should be disabled by default. When try to enable there can be warning that it can decrease performance in some cases. User should be able to decide of the size (changed on the fly or needs reboot to take effect). It can be part of expert mode or something like that.
Yes, there should beoptional swap on SD card especially on phone's like Alcatel One Touch Fire or ZTE Open (256MB RAM). With many applications in background, some apps like IRC client's or active chat in internet browser should be active, but with 256MB RAM there are closed.
Component: General → Gaia::System
Component: Gaia::System → GonkIntegration
example of use on hamachi:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uaa6OI5aopc&feature=youtu.be
I imagine the security implications of potentially sensitive user data ending up in a swap file on removable storage is one of the larger issues to solve.  While I'm sure technical savvy folks may understand the risks, most of our users would not.
This would be quite useful for investigating OOMs.  If a particular test case triggers an OOM you could enable swap, perform the test, then take a memory report after the point of failure.  Maybe it would be useful to have this in engineering builds.

(By the way, according to dmesg is seems that swap is enabled on the flame...)
But AFAIK Flame has zRAM enabled. Based on my experience with use swap file and zRAM on hamachi (Altactel Fire) I can say that zRAM is less flexible than swapfile. In fact zRAM is limited by RAM when swap is not.
Firefox OS is not being worked on
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 6 years ago
Resolution: --- → WONTFIX
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