On Sat, 24 Mar 2001, James, Rick wrote:
> Hello memory experts,
>
> I've always been under the impression that Linux REQUIRES a swap
> partition. Is that true?
> Reason for question: I'm considering a system with 4GB ram. If a
> swap partition is required, I think that might force me to use a PAE
> enabled kernel to access the swap space addresses. I don't care to
> use PAE if it can be avoided and I really don't need the swap anyways.
>
Since 2.4, the situation has changed a bit. You now can have either
_no_ swap or swap > 2* phyisical memory, which would be 8GB.
Running the system with anything between that (0 < swapspace < 8GB for
you) is considered very bad now and the recommendation remains to
enable swap.
Note that you will also have to make at least four swap partitions,
because the size of a swap partition is still limited to 2GB.
I also suspect you have misunderstood what PAE is about. It is independent
of the amount of virtual (here: physical + swap) memory, but otoh, you
already have to enable it to even access the full 4 GB of physical
memory.
As far as I remember, without PAE, you can only use half the virtal
address space (2GB) for physical memory, but that border should
be configurable within some limits (1GB - 3GB).
Arnd <><
