[KLUG Members] 2 GB swap space?

[Peter Buxton]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2003 at 01:51:56PM -0500, Adam Williams wrote:

> In days gone by,  go with 512Mb.  On a single drive system, if your
> that buried in swap, your dead anyway.  The 2x rule was out-of-date in
> the 2.0.x days, but made a brief come back in the 2.4.x,pre-2.4.~9
> days when the VM was totally screwed.

Um, not quite. Rik van Riel's reverse map virtual memory manager, gone
from all but Red Hat kernels as of 2.4.10, back in as of
2.5.30something, requires 2x RAM of swap to work properly. That is how
it is constructed. But really, with half a gig of memory, you should
never reach that point, and if you do, you should be hip deep in kernel
sysctl optimizations anyway with multiple disks anyway.

van Riel based his rmap vm on FreeBSD's Matt Dillon's design. In fact,
that seemed to be the problem -- van Riel copied the design rather too
well, and it was like a foreign body in the Linux kernel -- nice, but
not native. Andrea Arcangeli wrote a vm that was, functionally, a lot
like the 2.0-2.2 vm but without that vm's legacy limitations, i.e.,
SMP-clean, and bam! -- Linus dropped it into 2.4.10. An ugly, public
flamewar then ensued on the linux kernel mailing list (lkml).

Meanwhile, not even a month ago, Matt Dillon was stripped of his CVS
commit bit by FreeBSD's governing body, known as core, after Dillon
advocated a small, temporary hack on some boot defaults to make
development easier.  Core's decision was made in private, as usual, and
the very name "core" still sounds to me like the governing body of some
horrible, cyberpunk near-future dystopia a' la _1984_, _Logan's Run_ or
_Gattaca_.


-- 
-216
Though nothing is wasted, everything is spent. -- Annie Dillard