On Sunday, March 23, 2003, at 11:01 PM, Scott R. Godin wrote:
I'm very curious about how OS X works with swap partitions, as I've not seen
it mentioned overmuch. I'm sure there's a reason linux preferentially uses
a swap partition rather than using the main drive partitions. In fact, of
every drive I've added to my Linux box, I've dedicated a small portion of
it to swap memory.
Can anyone point me to information regarding setting up a swap partition
under OS X, and whether or not this is an installation option? (and if not,
why not?)
http://www.bombich.com/mactips/swap.html answers your swap partition question.
One of the reasons (at least one *I* could think of ;-)) for not using a entire partition, is that
when you run out of swap space, you could just delete some files and be done with it. Since darwin uses
80 meg swapfiles giving the system more swap space is just a matter of deleting some 80 megs.
With a swap partition you are SOL, since AFAIK darwin doesn't support multiple places for swap files (such as
Linux does...simply add another swapfile on a different partition.) Also, darwin will grow and shrink
the necessary amount of swap space as needed, thus will not block a certain amount of diskspace. Very elegant.
Kay
