From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Peter Chubb Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 00:08:49 +0000 Subject: RE: [Linux-ia64] mkswap fails to create large swap partitions on Message-Id: List-Id: References: In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-ia64@vger.kernel.org >>>>> "Kevin" = Van Maren writes: Kevin> So we're okay until about a couple terrabytes is all, until we Kevin> change all the index variables to "long". :-) But even one Kevin> terrabyte is 16x 64GB. I'm currently looking at some other problems which would also limit the size of a single swap file/device to 1TB --- the genhd code limits the size of a partition to 2^31-1 blocks, where a block is *known* to be 512 bytes. (The 512 number is so embedded that's it's going to be a major effort to remove, not only from the code, but from the brains of the programmers... so the only thing we can do is change the size of the index variables, and all the interfaces that use them). So even if swap could be specified bigger than 1TB, you couldn't create a volume that big to put it on (even with LVM). Kevin> Also, the kernel should probably try to use "some" of the swap Kevin> space if it can't vmalloc storage for the whole thing -- maybe Kevin> cut p->max in half until the vmalloc succeeds? I see the case Kevin> where you are low on memory and can't add more swap because you Kevin> can't allocate enough memory and the only swapfile you have is Kevin> 100GB... Interesting idea... I'll think about it. Peter C -- Working on the Gelato project http://www.gelato.org/ http://www.gelato.unsw.edu.au/ (coming soon!)