Arnd,
That certainly is interesting, I hadn't heard that before (that swap
should be 2*physical). What are the implications of having a swap less
than 2*physical? You say it's "very bad", could you elaborate?
I ask because during the installation process of cooker, I let it
automagically select my partition sizes (just cause I wanted to see if
it worked :-) ), and it made a swap partion exactly equal to my
physical ram (actually a little less. 256 MB physical, 243 MB swap).
If it is supposed to be 2*physical, then shouldn't the installer be
changed to work that way?
Eaon
On 24 Mar 2001 18:07:56 +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> 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 <><
>
>
