On Thu, 30 Mar 2000, Larry McVoy wrote:
>I've watched this go on (and on and on) and I don't remember anyone
>thinking of this easy solution: just use free disk space in any
>mounted file system as swap over flow. So if you run out, create
>/lost+found/swap-overflow, do a mkswap on it, and start allocating
>swap pages out of there. What's the problem with that?
I thought of that, and somebody else mentioned having an "emergency use
only" swap partition. The kernel already has swap files, but the size is
fixed. How easy would it be to grow a swap file on demand?
>Sure it isn't "secure" because all your file systems can be full, but that's
>unlikely, use the last X% reserved for root. For the anal among us, you can
>add a "reserved swap space" to the file system and make that be big enough.
>Disk is cheap.
IDE is amazingly cheap.
The reasons I discount the "add more swap" arguments are:
1. People would just tend to mount all swap in the first place
(but you are talking about dynamic swap, so this doesn't apply)
2. Sometimes increasing physical memory doesn't solve the problem,
on the principle that user tasks tend to expand to use all
available resources.
3. Arguably, if a system is THAT deep into swap, something needs
to be killed anyway. How many systems that run OOM would be
okay with another few megabytes? Not very often in my
experience.
4. It seems like a workaround, not a solution to the problem.
Dave
David Whysong dwhysong@physics.ucsb.edu
Astrophysics graduate student University of California, Santa Barbara
My public PGP keys are on my web page - http://www.physics.ucsb.edu/~dwhysong
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