Re: Best way to create RAID-6 for swap partition - existing one failed

[likewhoa <likewhoa@weboperative.com>]

Why not just let the kernel handle the stripping for you, IMO using
dmraid is overkill for swap when it can all be handled by the kernel
itself with 'swap -p1 /dev/sda1' for example.
 
On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 13:59 -0500, Stan Hoeppner wrote:
> On 5/16/2011 4:41 PM, Gavin Flower wrote:
> 
> > Motivation, existing RAID-6 swap partition failed.  I am thinking I should recreate it in a new format, as currently it is 'Version : 0.90', rather than simply rebuild it.
> <snip>
> 
> Forget using a partition.  Simply use a swap file.  This example creates
> a 1GB swap file in the / filesystem.  You can locate it on any
> filesystem you wish.
> 
> # swappoff -a
> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile1 bs=1024 count=1048576
> # mkswap /swapfile1
> # swapon /swapfile1
> # vi /etc/fstab
> Add:
> /swapfile1 swap swap defaults 0 0
> 
> and remove your old entry for the failed swap partition.
> 
> There is little performance difference between swap files and swap
> partitions with modern kernels.  The kernel will map the disk location
> of the swap file and perform direct disk access, bypassing the
> filesystem and buffer cache.
>