*BSD News Article 85506


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From: Roger Armstrong <mcurry@fred.net>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: What is smallest swap file size possible?
Date: Mon, 23 Dec 1996 23:11:34 -0500
Organization: FredNet - Frederick, Md.
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Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33042

Joerg, didn't this discussion originally center around a firmware
installation of FreeBSD?  If so, is it not more reasonable to simply
stipulate a big chunk of RAM (heck, what's 16MB among friends?) as a
ramdisk, and make it a swap partition?  Why cripple the OS in an attempt
to do away with swap space?

If I missed the point entirely...well, never mind!

Mike

J Wunsch wrote:
> 
> mi@rtfm.ziplink.net (Mikhail Teterin) wrote:
> 
> > I recall, there was a work going on to enable taking some devices
> > OUT of the swap list... So that you can add some devices and later
> > stop swaping on them dynamicly without a reboot. Currently, AFAIK,
> > you can only go one direction -- adding. What is the status of this?
> 
> Nothing new.  The problem is that you can't simply ``swapoff'' it.
> You either have to move all paged-out pages from the secondary storage
> to another paging area, _and_ (and i think that's the bummer) change
> all references pointing to this page to make it pointing to the new
> backup storage.  Alternatively, it might be possible to pick the SGI
> Irix route, and use `swapoff' to only mark that paging area as ``no
> longer to be used'', so it will slowly free up as the pages there are
> being referenced.  Needless to say, it can still take an indefinite
> amount of time until it's actually freed up from all pages, so you
> could finally ``umount'' it.
> 
> --
> cheers, J"org
> 
> joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
> Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)