> That was my first concern, too. However, umount -a already unmounts all
> the filesystems listed in /etc/mtab (not fstab), so I don't see a problem
> with swapoff -a doing something similar. Also, /proc/mounts exists,
> although when it was first introduced there were similar discutions on
> whether it duplicates /etc/mtab and takes care of a userspace problem or
> not.
I (dare to) second those thoughts. I don't think /proc/swaps could be
viewed as lightly as an amusement or correcting a userspace problem. Think
about a daemon that creates swap files on the fly whenever mem gets tight.
If something happens with this daemon and it dies, this could be the only
way to find out where are the swapfiles.
> > If you add swap areas manually, why can't you
> > remove them manually? Why would you even *want* swapoff -a to remove a
> > swap area swapon -a hasn't added?
>
> Even if you don't want that, there are certain situations when knowing
> which partitions/files are being used for swapping is really useful.
That's right, and /proc already tells me how many interrupts my system has
gotten during uptime (who cares about those values?:) I think it's much
more important to know usage information about my swap areas individually.
R$0.02...
Fabio
( Fabio Olive Leite leitinho@akira.ucpel.tche.br )
( Computer Science Student http://akira.ucpel.tche.br/~leitinho )
( )
( Running Linux is like running an Amiga; )
( It gives you that "I don't buy Microsoft" feeling... )