NativeSD (for HD2) A new way to run android ports.

[Caldair]

There has been some interesting developments recently over at the HD2 forums. Check out the thread:

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=31110691#post31110691

It is all really new at this point but this seems pretty exciting to me. The thought of being able to run multiple roms off of the SD card, with possibly greater performance than on NAND, makes me drool a little. You could run a winmo base and have OMGB and GBXO* at your disposal with nearly unlimited data size, or it seems even run a NANDroid rom as base with other versions off of SD! (ie GBX0* on NAND with the ability to boot OMGB\CM7.2 from SD)

From the original thread:

Introduction

We have SD ROMs for very long time, but I think most of the people should agree with me that the SD ROMs are slower than NAND ROMs. because the SD ROMs use system.ext4 and data.ext4 files to store all the ROM contant on the FAT partition, the IO access is the bottleneck.
My Class10 SD card has 10MB/s R/W speed, but the NAND flash R/W speed is only about 4MB/s. so if we can directly install the ROMs to SDCARD and boot from SDCARD we will get lots of benifits:​

1. Faster Read/Write speed than NAND ROMs
2. Bigger data partition for user space (depends on how big the ext4 partition on SDCARD)
3. Install servel ROMs at the same time. and each ROM share the same space
4. Muilt-boot support, easy to switch between the ROMs been installed.

The NativeSD Rom is a new kind of ROM it needs an ext4 partition on your SDCARD.

This thread will tell you how to install a ROM to SDCARD and give some script templates for ROM Devs to make the ROM installer which can support install the ROM to NAND flash or SD/EXT4.

Install the ROM to SD/EXT4 will not effact the ROM(WM or Android) on NAND flash, NativeSD should support run from MAGLDR CLK or WM6.5(need test).

For the time being this is of course all for the HD2. Now I monkeyed around with this a bit but had no luck on the TP2, since I have no knowledge of what is really going on here! Just thought I would share this because it is an interesting change in porting ideology.

I will be keeping a close eye on that thread waiting for the level of skill involved in getting a similar setup for Rhod to come down to my level! (the sub-basement )

 

[arrrghhh]

It's basically what Neopeek has been doing for ages. Create native ext* partitions on the SD card, and use those.

I think the real problem is the interface on the RHOD for reading and writing to the SD card isn't so great - so a class 10 card will probably be lost.

Also, I don't know what that guy is talking about - raw linear write or read speed is not what OSes do... they are mostly random read/writes, so you'd want to test SD card performance for that.