Quick opinion on Android x86 for T100

[Jack Padilla]

So far, it runs pretty well on my end (It even runs apps that refuse to run on other machines with Android-x86). The only issue is that it regularly hangs requiring me to force restart the system. If there is a fix for that, I would love to know.

[Jack Padilla]

I'm not sure if I can grab a crash log when the system hangs...

[cheatman]

You can't as it's a storage (SSD) problem that prevents you from writing any data on the disk. It's a known issue, with possible resolution in the 3.19 kernel. 

[Jack Padilla]

So, it's a kernel error/panic that's causing the hang?

[cheatman]

No, it is not a kernel panic. The operating system simply waits for very slow write operations to the disk. And because the write operations time out, the system seems to hang.

It does not hang, it is just extremely slow (about 1200 times slower than normal in my experiments). What would take 1 second to perform normally, would take 20 minutes instead when the problem occurs.

To avoid this problem try writing as little as possible to the disk. This is hard to achieve, as logs and other OS stuff gets written to the disk anyway even if you don't know it.

We are trying to find a way to fix this, but it is complicated :-)

Cheers,
C.

[André Vitor]

I don't own T100 but seems like you are degrading your SSD and android-x86 doesn't mount system with Discard option to do TRIM by automatic.

I'm using android-x86 4.4-r2 on my tablet in its SSD with partition file system as EXT4, when I first installed it in a partition that already had previously been used by windows I needed to use fstrim (or defrag /O /V on Windows) to back the SSD speed to normal. 

If I don't do this, the first boot will take a really long time and the system hangs a lot until I use fstrim.

Seems your T100 is just running as it should, you're not just clearing the SSD.

BUT again, I don't own T100 and I may be wrong but this is what seems to be happening with you in my opinion.

If a SSD has been used previously with a non-TRIM aware filesystem or OS then all the writeable blocks will eventually get consumed and the SSD will be forced into the slow real-time READ-ERASE-WRITE procedure instead of the quicker WRITE procedure (this is an over-simplified explanation, do a web search for the full story).

[Fajar A. Nugraha]

No, trim has nothing to do with it. I own a T100.

The SSD is quite capable of dealing with the workload even without
manual trim. And the "hang" happens even when you use HDD (which I
did), the one in the keyboard (available in some t100 models).

For anything useful (e.g. playing a long-duration game) with android
on t100, I'm sticking with ami duos for now (virtualbox-based). Not as
resource-efficient (I can only assign about 1.2G memory to android,
and even that was with manual edit to the config file). Still keen to
test android-x86 with 3.19 kernel when it comes out though,

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[Chih-Wei Huang]

Thank yo for the valuable input.

So what did you do exactly for it?
What do you suggest android-x86 to add
to support SSD well?

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[André Vitor]

From times and times I use "fstrim -v /system" but to a public release I think it's best to mount system during the boot with discard option "mount -o remount,discard /system".

I made a disk benchmark with app called "A1 SD Bench" comparing read/write speed with nodiscard option and discard option. The results are below to download.

The system used was android-x86 4.4-r2 with kernel x86_64, filesystem ext4.

With discard the results shows solid values while nodiscard shows inconsistent values.

There is no MUCH difference between the results but in the long term this may change.

[Jack Padilla]

@Chih-Wei Huang

This issue occurs if you run the T100 android-x86 build either on live mode (If not installed) or if you run it through the SSD (If installed).

It probably might be a problem with the build on the T100 img you gave us from September (A bug perhaps).