[Bug 1566129] Re: server installer partitioning suggestions need refinement

[Seth Arnold]

How much swap space the installer should allocate was discussed at the
Athens sprint, June 2016.

Near as I can recall the outcome was:

- The installer should configure a 1 or 2 gigabyte swap _file_ on the
filesystem.

The actual size didn't much matter -- so long as the kernel has some
swap available, it can make better RAM scheduling decisions than without
swap available. No one wants to run too far into swap, and root
filesystems can be small so don't use too much of it.

Putting it in a file makes it easier to resize or remove later.

Putting it in a file also makes it easier to encrypt the swap, if FDE is
being used.

Putting it in a file does make it less reliable than a partition but by
and large it should mostly work well enough.

There was also discussion about putting the swap file in a directory and
perhaps configuring something to just swapon and use all files in the
directory, so users can just fallocate files in there as they want.

There was also discussion about using
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt but I don't think
there was consensus about whether or not this should be used by default.

Thanks

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1566129

Title:
  server installer partitioning suggestions need refinement

Status in debian-installer package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  At least the server installer will make silly partitioning
  recommendations when the disk size is similar to the RAM size. In my
  case, 120 gigabyte hard drives with 128 gigabytes of RAM the installer
  recommended:

  - 1.0 MB freespace
  - 536.9 MB ESP
  - 899.7 /
  - 120.2 GB swap
  - 1.0 MB freespace

  This would not be a useful computer.

  Some possible heuristics to apply:

  - 16 or 32 gigabytes of swap is probably plenty -- beyond this, swapoff time may dominate reboots
  - 10 gigabytes of / is probably a minimum, below this perhaps swap should be completely ignored

  Thanks

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