[LUAU] Running a standard distro without swap space
Jim Thompson
jim at netgate.com
Thu May 12 17:22:20 PDT 2005
On May 12, 2005, at 9:15 AM, Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:
> Charles Lockhart wrote:
>
>> Any ideas on how well a machine running a popular distribution of
>> Linux (RH, FCx, Mandrake, Debian, etc) would do if the machine had no
>> swap partition? Anybody actually do it? If so, how well did work?
>>
> Not by design but through a stupid screw-up, the CentOS demo at
> McKinley has no swap partition/file. (I tried to install Solaris on
> an extended partition, but instead installed it on the 4th primary
> partition--thus wiping out the original swap partition as well as
> everything else that had existed on the extended partitions, which are
> logical partitions derived from the 4th primary partition.)
>
> However, Michael and I have been able to run a bunch of stuff on this
> inadvertent swap-less CentOS, including Windows XP-Pro on VMWare,
> seemingly without any problem. The latter is known to be quite
> memory-intensive. (BTW the CentOS/Solaris demo machine has 1 GB DDR.)
but if you had enough physram to deal with VMWare anyway...
> I thought if you don't provide a specific swap partition or swap file,
> the paging routine will, when called upon, simply use any space (or
> fragmented spaces) it can find. Still true?
In the absence of a swap area, where would the paging routine put dirty
pages that otherwise
don't have a backing store (e.g. pages that aren't part of files, but
which have been modified)?
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