Q: Reason for partitioning scheme?

Markus Hitter mah at jump-ing.de
Thu Dec 13 20:08:38 UTC 2007


Am 13.12.2007 um 20:19 schrieb Emmet Hikory:

> One of the great advantages of having a swap partition is that  
> everything becomes unbearably slow in a runaway memory situation,  
> as opposed to the system losing arbitrary processes to the OOM-killer.

The few times I've seen runaway processes, they immediately crashed  
or stopped misbehaving if they get hit by failing memory allocations.

That said, I agree an OS should do it's best (even swap partitions  
can fill up) to satisfy what a process' demands. With a variable size  
swap file inside a file system you could do even better and you  
wouldn't waste several Gigabytes of disk space all the time for these  
very rare cases.

For those guys with Terabyte platters: think about an EeePC: 1 GB  
RAM, 4 GB disk.


Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/








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