Booting - Enterprise Volume Management System

[Alexander Skwar]

· Thiers Botelho <thiersb at gmail.com>:

> On 8/15/06, Alexander Skwar <listen at alexander.skwar.name> wrote:
>> · Thiers Botelho <thiersb at gmail.com>:
>> > On 8/14/06, Alexander Skwar <listen at alexander.skwar.name> wrote:
>> >> · Thiers Botelho <thiersb at gmail.com>:
>>
>> >> What do you mean with this? Do you plan on doing suspend-to-disk
>> >> and store that in a file?
>> >>
>> >
>> > Yep. Those files would be for use with suspend2, supposing it works as
>> > advertised.
>>
>> Ok. Why do you plan to suspend to a file? Why waste space for such
>> a file, if there's a swap partition? Is there any advantage in
>> doing suspend to file compared to suspend to swap?
>>
>> Alexander Skwar
> 
> If I have a file specifically for performing suspend, I can :
> 
> - have a 300 Mb swap partition, instead of a 2 Gb one for suspending
> (assuming 2 Gb of RAM) ;

Hm, why is that, by itself, an advantage? What's bad in having
2Gb swap? Granted, it might not be needed, but if the space needs
to be reserved for the file, then why not make it so, that it
can be used for other things as well?

> - have one single swap partition serving multiple Linux systems,
> instead of one for each of them ;

Yep.

> - more flexibility when moving / deleting / resizing the suspend area .

Hm. Why should the suspend area be resized? How often do
you add RAM to a system, so that the suspend area needs
to be resized?

With LVM, on the other hand, you can also easily resize 
a swap "partition", if swap is on LVM. It can also be 
deleted. But it cannot be moved.

> Of course if I end up with one suspend file for each system I'll have
> no space savings.

Yep. And you make the setup more complicated. Using a suspend
file for suspend2 isn't as easy as using a swap partition; and
with swsusp, suspending to file isn't supported at all.

> I just think that files provide more flexibility 
> than partitions

Are you using swap partitions at all then? If you're so much into
"flexibility" (although I don't see the flexibility *G*), then why
don't you use swap files? As far as I know, in 2.6 kernels, there's
no performance penalty in using swap files, compared with swap 
"partitions".

You're of course right, that files provide more flexibility than
partitions. I don't understand, why that flexibility is needed
with the suspend "destination" or with swap.

But in the end, it's your system and you've got to decide, what
you do with your system.

> (call me a flexibility freak if you wish).  :)) 

;)

Alexander Skwar
-- 
Die Freiheit macht den Menschen schuldig.