| Walt Mankowski on 19 Dec 2007 12:15:57 -0800 |
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On Wed, Dec 19, 2007 at 02:53:04PM -0500, Jeff McAdams wrote: > We've done this where I work, on occasion. We have some commercial apps > (aren't they always the problem children?) that insist on having x > amount of swap space available on the system, regardless of whether > there's ever any real chance of even touching it. So we use dd to > create a big file of the size needed, mkswap it, and swapon it at a > priority level that it'll never get used. Badly behaved commercial apps > are happy, and the only thing we're out is some disk space that'll never > get touched. Shoot...if you can swing a way to create the file as a > sparse file, there's a pretty good chance that most of that disk space > will never actually get allocated anyway! Using a sparse file as a swap file sounds like a really dangerous idea, and I'm not even sure it's supported. The manpage for mkswap(8) says: Note that a swap file must not contain any holes which would seem to rule out sparse files. I always thought the main advantage of swap partitions over swap files was speed. All the bytes in a partition are continuous, so access time is slightly higher than for a file created with dd, which can be scattered over the disk. Walt Attachment:
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