Re: Swap vnode's [was overcommit thread]

From: Matija Nalis (mnalis-j@voyager.hr)
Date: Sat Apr 01 2000 - 06:41:42 EST


On 31 Mar 2000 13:18:19 +0200, Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> 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 don't know why you don't remeber it, it was mentioned at least a dozen
times.

If you had free space, you could just add it to to swap space immedeately.
But that is just shifting a problem, not solving it in any way.

Another thing is, when your "active" swap space becomes much larger then
your real RAM, the system will become completely unusable, connections will
time out, and nothing will get done (and it will take days for some
processes to finally die, and enable system to continue working). I would
prefer random process killer to that. Heck, I'll even prefer kernel panic
with reboot to that.

-- 
Opinions above are GNU-copylefted.

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