<font size="4"><br>This seems to work on Slackware and Arch but does not have much effect on Debian based Bodhi Distro.<br><br><br></font><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">frank james</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:fhj1723@gmail.com">fhj1723@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
Date: 14 September 2012 08:13<br>Subject: Re: [Rustington] Raspberry Pi speed up tip for Raspberry Pi users<br>To: Martin Webb <<a href="mailto:vobbelyvebb@gmail.com">vobbelyvebb@gmail.com</a>><br><br><br>That sounds a great improvement. We shall have to see it again next time that we meet. Thanks Martin.<div>
Frank in Norwich<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 10:22 PM, Martin Webb <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:vobbelyvebb@gmail.com" target="_blank">vobbelyvebb@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><font size="4">The Raspberry PI has 256MB of memory which is split between the operating system and the GPU. As it is a small amount of memory by modern standards the way it is split is done really matters. The distributions for the Pi by default splits the memory 50/50 which works well for a lots of things but means that web browsing is pretty hopeless. In most machines you would change this split by changing a setting in the BIOS, but the Pi does not have a BIOS so the method is different.<br>
<br>On the boot partition there are several files that end in ".elf". The Broadcom system-on-a-chip on the device looks for a file named "start.elf" before loading the operating system. This file also decides how the split is done. Several other ".elf" files exist these start with "arm128", "arm192" and "arm224". The number in these files is how much memory will be given to the OS (the remaining memory goes to the video chip). The more memory you give to the video chip the more it can do, but less is available to the OS so it consequently can do less and so on. How you split depends on what you are doing, a set top box type use might go for a 50/50 split, a desktop might want more memory for the OS. I backed up the old "start.elf" file to "old_start.elf" and copied "arm192_start.elf" to "start.elf" and rebooted. The difference was dramatic, Midori was now able to browse web pages in a pretty respectable fashion. I even tried it with some Javascript heavy sites and it coped. It is not as fast as browsing the web on a laptop, but is usable.</font><br>
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