Re: Maximum swap space?

William Lee Irwin III
2003-06-07T21:37:41Z

Followup to: <33435.4.64.196.31.1055008200.squirrel@www.osdl.org>
By author: "Randy.Dunlap" <rddunlap@osdl.org>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>> Linux 2.4.10 and later, and Linux 2.5 support any combination of swap
>> files or swap devices to a maximum number of 32 of them. Prior to Linux
>> 2.4.10, the limit was any combination of 8 swap files or swap devices. On
>> x86 architecture systems, each of these swap areas has a limit of 2 GiB.

On Sat, Jun 07, 2003 at 02:43:54PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 2 GiB is getting a bit tight, especially with tmpfs, ust like the
> previous limits of 16 MiB and 128 MiB were getting tight at various
> points, and it's annoying to have to make multiple partitions.
> tmpfs is a good thing -- in my experience even if it is stored
> primarily on disk it is much faster for temp files than any other
> filesystem, simply because it never has to worry about consistency.
> This means it's entirely reasonable to have a "farm" machine with a
> 40 GiB tmpfs used for everything except the OS itself.

The 2GB limit is 100% userspace; distros are already shipping the
mkswap(8) fixes (both RH & UL anyway).

-- wli