It's been rumoured that Alan Orndorff said:
>
> Actually, I would hope that all Unices would be able
> to use files for swap.
The reasons that swap spaces are perenially partitions and not
flat files are due partly to historical hysteria and partly
administrative admonitions.
The paranoids always logic'ed: if the OS does go completly
berserk, maybe at most it will harm only the swap partitiion,
instead of the whole filesystem. This is not entirely
a useful kind of paranoia to have these days.
The sysadmins like to have multiple partitions because
it makes backup easier (on mid-size machines). /usr in
one partition is mostly readonly anyway ... /var which
has a lot of disk i/o goes on a separate disk in case
of disk failure ... and to speed i/o. And its pointless
to backup swap files or swap partitions. So the only
partitions that get backed up nightly are /var and /home
You can see some of unix's mid-size heritage shining
through in the popular linux practices of the day ...
not all of which are appropriate for single-user, home
PC systems.
--linas
----- %< -------------------------------------------- >% ------
The GnuCash / X-Accountant Mailing List
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and
put "unsubscribe gnucash-devel [EMAIL PROTECTED]" in the body
