On Sat, 10 Oct 1998 15:01:11 +0200 (MET DST), Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl
said:
> [I was somewhat disappointed by the new swapspace code
> in 2.1.117. On the one hand it is incompatible with
> the old code, so that one cannot easily use the same
> partition as (large) swap space under 2.1 and (smaller)
> under 2.0.
That was unavoidable. The old swap style is fundamentally broken on
some architectures: you cannot use it on the first partition of any disk
using BSD disklabels. It's unfortunate, but a new format was necessary
to get around that: we *have* to keep the first 1k of the partition free
to support disklabels properly.
> On the other hand the improvement is not very large. Now a swap
> partition can be up to 2 GB. (Used to be 1/8 GB on i386, 1/2 GB on
> alpha.)]
That's just an implementation restriction on the current mkbigswap.c.
There are a number of nasty library dependencies which can break 64-bit
file code on glibc (e2fsprogs autoconf broke on >2GB partitions when
glibc was released, for example). I'm not going to encourage >2GB
partitions until I've got >4GB partitions properly tested. The new
format does not have any fundamental restriction to 2GB: it will work
happily up to the upper block device limit of 1TB.
--Stephen
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