[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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