On May 12, 2005, at 9:15 AM, Hawaii Linux Institute wrote:
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.)
but if you had enough physram to deal with VMWare anyway...
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?
In the absence of a swap area, where would the paging routine put dirty
pages that otherwise
don't have a backing store (e.g. pages that aren't part of files, but
which have been modified)?
