Re: Swap partition vs swap file

Eric Sandall
2005-07-09T22:59:20Z

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On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Wakko Warner wrote:
> Jeremy Nickurak wrote:
>> On ven, 2005-07-08 at 03:22 +0200, Bernd Eckenfels wrote:
>>> No, it is creating files by appending just like any other file write. One
>>> could think about a call to create unfragmented files however since this is
>>> not always working best is to create those files young or defragment them
>>> before usage.
>>
>> Except that this defeats one of the biggest advantages a swap file has
>> over a swap partition: the ability to easilly reconfigure the amount of
>> hd space reserved for swap.
>
> Of course, now this begs the question: Is it possible to create a large file
> w/o actually writing that much to the device (ie uninitialized). There's
> absolutely no reason that a swap file needs to be fully initialized, only
> part which mkswap does. Of course, I would expect that ONLY root beable to
> do this. (or capsysadmin or whatever the caps are)

That would make the swap file fragment as it's used, instead of
allocating one big file (the entire file) at once (and hopefully get
one contiguous chunk of the disk).

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall | Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric@sandall.us | http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/ | SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/ #196285 | http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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