FreeBSD's embedded agenda

[James Mansion]

>Experience suggests that wear leveling does matter in this market, but
>that fairly simple wear leveling can be very effective.

Can I ask why? I mmay be a  very bed person to talk about phones,
because I have a 6-year-old Seimens I chose for battery life and
the first thing I did was disable IrDa and WAP.  It doesn't have
a camera. ;-)  And I've never sent a text.

I can see that you might want to store 'call missed' messages
and incoming texts, and phone lists etc, and maybe store a
photo or two, but these things are either low-frequency or
user-driven and very low frequency.  Where are all the updates
coming from?

My phone is the oldest of any of the people I've worked with
in my last two contracts.  Its well out of warranty, and I
suspect its out of its design life too.

If you take Linux as an example, even without physical wear-
levelling you can run for a long, long time if you run with
noatime and defer physical updates with laptop mode. Of
course, laptop mode can leave you exposed, but I would hope
that soft-updates can effectively help out here in terms of
a strategy to write blocks in an order that's sane.