This has always been the most glaring obstacle with user apps.. Where to store data. The player uses /dev/hda3 in some kind of a raw mode, and the Empeg guys have cautioned developers not to use it for other applications because it's extremely undocumented, and the player could very well write anywhere on that partition.

That leaves us with the 32MB /dev/hda2 partition which I'm currently using as my /usr partition. This partition is left alone during an upgrade, which is good. However it seems the upgrade rewrites the partition table, so I don't know if that would screw things up if we used this as our "user app dynamic data" partition.

Does anyone know any reason why /dev/hda2 wouldn't be suitable for this? Sadly I'm not well versed enough in sector-level I/O to understand the implications of this... Like, even though it's not mounted RW, if the app is writing to a sector and the power goes, you're SOL. So I can see a lot of instances where user apps might lose data unless they were very judicious about when they did their writes... Seems all of this could be a big hurdle, no?