Hi David, On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 5:56 PM David Laight <david.lai...@aculab.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 4, 2021 at 1:59 PM Linus Torvalds > > <torva...@linux-foundation.org> wrote: > > > And, as far as I know, all the normal distributions set things up with > > > swap partitions, not files, because honestly, swapfiles tend to be > > > slower and have various other complexity issues. > > > > Looks like this has changed in at least Ubuntu: my desktop machine, > > which got Ubuntu 18.04LTS during initial installation, is using a (small) > > swapfile instead of a swap partition. > > My older ubuntu (13.04) didn't have swap at all.
IIRC, the small swapfile was the default suggestion. I don't really need swap (yummy, 53 GiB in buff/cache ;-) > I had to add some when running multiple copies of the Altera > fpga software started causing grief. > That will be a file. Or switch FPGA, and use yosys ;-) > After all once you start swapping it is all horrid and slow. > Swap to file may be slower, but apart from dumping out inactive > pages you really don't want to be doing it - so it doesn't matter. > > Historically swap was a partition and larger than physical memory. > This allows simple 'dump to swap' on panic (for many disk types). > But I've not seen that support in linux. I know. We started with lots of small partitions, but nowadays the distros wan't to install everything in a single[*] partition, even swap. [*] Ignoring /boot/efi, which didn't exist in the good ol' days. Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- ge...@linux-m68k.org In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds