In reply to:

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I guess I just don't get it.

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Interesting. As somebody who is doing active development on the empeg I guess I would expect you to "get it". As you mentioned there is no advantage to ext3 for read only operations. It is those times when it needs to be mounted rw that makes ext3 worth it for me. I spend a fair amount of time playing with third party software on my empeg and I am not that great about remembering to remount the drives read only. When I forget the 30+ minute fsck hurts. The thing that originally prompted me to get ext3 working was a couple of crashes while running a more unstable version of jemplode which resulted in long drive checks.

Ext3 could also be useful for applications that need to be able to store settings while the empeg is running. Gpsapp for example doesn't currently remember any of your settings between restarts. I assume at some point you will want to add the ability to save your waypoints, popup settings, etc. The easiest way to do that without using precious flash would be to temporarily remount the programs partition rw and write out a config file which would be a lot safer if the partition is journaled.

Anyway, those are a couple of the things that can be beneficial about journaling on the empeg. In my experience the potential performance issues you brought up haven't been an issue. I can still up and download files from the empeg at around 900k/sec. The memory issues could be a problem on the mk1, but on the mk2 and 2a there is a little extra ram to burn.

-Mike