Now that ext3 has gone mainstream (it's in Linus' kernel, says /.) I think it would be a good idea in the existing player.

But it's only in 2.4, right? There are several drivers (and some VM "issues") that'd need porting to 2.4 before it came up sensibly on a car player. It's something we'd like to do, especially now the 2.4 VM seems to have sorted its life out, but haven't got round to. (Never mind your Google or your IBM Data Explorer: try mmap'ing a 50Mb file for a protocol download of an Orb track, with 12Mb of RAM and no swap. Now *that's* VM pressure...)

I worry that we'll all have to rebuild our disks to add more swap before long

There is an entirely spare partition knocking about somewhere (though not a very big one). I was going to suggest swapping to a file, but of course that's somewhat unhelpful if the reason you need swap is to fsck the partition that the swapfile's on...

Peter