Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On Friday 23 January 2009 14:58:32 Grant Edwards wrote: Mainly because I use ntfsclone to keep a bunch of backup copies of the NTFS partition, and having a 2GB swap file in every backup copy starts to eat up a lot of disk space. In the days when I ran Windows I used to have at least one partition other than C and force the swap file onto it, with fixed size. Then I could just omit that partition from the backup. Perhaps it's still possible to do that; I don't know, but it might be worth a try. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On 23 Jan 2009, at 21:10, Paul Hartman wrote: ... From memory it's just to delete it, which is perfect. It would take too long to zero it out - I don't think that's the purpose. ... After further googling, it appears it *does* fill the pagefile.sys with zeros, and adds a significant delay to windows shutdown times. So it won't do anything for the OP in this case. I don't know why I said from memory before, I was surely just making the assumption. ISTM a bit daft, under Windows, to zero out the pagefile. If you have physical access to the computer, most anything in the swapfile will be available elsewhere on the hard-drive anyway. About the only thing you *might* get out of it is passwords, but that's not something for a very amateur hacker. I guess writing the whole routine to (free up swap memory, check the registry for this setting ) zero the swapfile not to have been a mere 5 minute job. How hard would it have been to add an option _just_ to delete it? This just requires freeing the inode, is surely less work, and would have been more useful to far more people. *sigh* Microsoft. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On Saturday 24 January 2009 15:35:32 Grant Edwards wrote: I didn't have a spare primary parition to put the swap file on. I had a bunch of spare extended partitions but all the docs say you can't put the XP swap file on en extended paritition... Ah, I didn't know that. In Win98, I think it was, I used to put it on drive E, which was a logical disk in the extended partition. -- Rgds Peter
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On 24 Jan 2009, at 17:22, Grant Edwards wrote: I still can't believe that Windows does it's swapping using a normal filesystem -- and by default it's the same filesystem used for system and application files. It seems like the filesystem code would end up being a serious bottleneck. 3. Does creating the swapfile on a journaled filesystem (e.g. ext3 or reiser) incur a significant performance hit? None at all. The kernel generates a map of swap offset - disk blocks at swapon time and from then on uses that map to perform swap I/O directly against the underlying disk queue, bypassing all caching, metadata and filesystem code. http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/7/7/326 Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On 23 Jan 2009, at 14:58, Grant Edwards wrote: On 2009-01-23, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: On 23 Jan 2009, at 05:16, Grant Edwards wrote: ... I found a very slick solution that lets Windows XP use a Linux swap partition for swap/paging/vm/whatever-MS-calls-it: http://db.bme.hu/~surprof/SwapFs-i/ That looks a really cool useful idea. However, I have a reservation. Since you NEED to use it - perhaps for space considerations? Yup. Mainly because I use ntfsclone to keep a bunch of backup copies of the NTFS partition, and having a 2GB swap file in every backup copy starts to eat up a lot of disk space. It might be possible to script removing the swap file at shutdown (or place a wrapper script to mount the partition remove the swapfile before running ntfsclone). But I appreciate this is less elegant than just using the same swap partition for both o/s. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 10:08 AM, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: On 23 Jan 2009, at 14:58, Grant Edwards wrote: On 2009-01-23, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: On 23 Jan 2009, at 05:16, Grant Edwards wrote: ... I found a very slick solution that lets Windows XP use a Linux swap partition for swap/paging/vm/whatever-MS-calls-it: http://db.bme.hu/~surprof/SwapFs-i/ That looks a really cool useful idea. However, I have a reservation. Since you NEED to use it - perhaps for space considerations? Yup. Mainly because I use ntfsclone to keep a bunch of backup copies of the NTFS partition, and having a 2GB swap file in every backup copy starts to eat up a lot of disk space. It might be possible to script removing the swap file at shutdown (or place a wrapper script to mount the partition remove the swapfile before running ntfsclone). But I appreciate this is less elegant than just using the same swap partition for both o/s. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314834 There is a registry setting in Windows to clear the pagefile.sys at shutdown. What does clear mean? To overwrite with 0? To delete? I don't know. Paul
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On 23 Jan 2009, at 17:09, Paul Hartman wrote: ... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314834 There is a registry setting in Windows to clear the pagefile.sys at shutdown. What does clear mean? To overwrite with 0? To delete? I don't know. From memory it's just to delete it, which is perfect. It would take too long to zero it out - I don't think that's the purpose. Instead, I think, it should prevent swapfile fragmentation - making it a very good general-purpose setting to enable. What would be really idea for the OP is some kind of grub setting a bash script that formats the partition to the appropriate format for the o/s being booted. But you'd have to be clever about it to avoid long boot times. Stroller.
Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Howto share Linux swap partition with Windows XP
On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Stroller strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk wrote: On 23 Jan 2009, at 17:09, Paul Hartman wrote: ... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314834 There is a registry setting in Windows to clear the pagefile.sys at shutdown. What does clear mean? To overwrite with 0? To delete? I don't know. From memory it's just to delete it, which is perfect. It would take too long to zero it out - I don't think that's the purpose. Instead, I think, it should prevent swapfile fragmentation - making it a very good general-purpose setting to enable. What would be really idea for the OP is some kind of grub setting a bash script that formats the partition to the appropriate format for the o/s being booted. But you'd have to be clever about it to avoid long boot times. Stroller. After further googling, it appears it *does* fill the pagefile.sys with zeros, and adds a significant delay to windows shutdown times. So it won't do anything for the OP in this case.
