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.)
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? Wayne
