what is the difference between swap partition and swap

[Derek Broughton]

Jonas Norlander wrote:

> 2009/3/12 Derek Broughton <derek at pointerstop.ca>:
>> Brian Norman Wootton wrote:
>>
>>> There used to be a maximum partition size for swap of 2 GB, I don't know
>>> if this still applies.
>>
>> Never in my memory (I started using at least 3GB when I bought my Dell
>> laptop at least 5 years ago, because I was using swap for tmpfs).
> 
> Well there are a limit of 4 Gb (if you use 32 bit architectures) for
> your virtual memory and that includes RAM, Swap, Graphics memory and
> other devices. 

Surely that's not right.  People are using 4GB _real_ memory (using PAE
kernels) - do they not get any swap at all?  I really am going to have to
finish the installation on this machine...
-- 
derek