why ubuntu LTS installs all in a single partition?

[Colin Watson]

On Sat, Aug 03, 2013 at 03:28:27PM +0100, Liam Proven wrote:
> On 3 August 2013 04:13, Christofer C. Bell <christofer.c.bell at gmail.com> wrote:
> > While it may work for you, a blanket recommendation to have no swap should
> > be avoided.  Please look into how Linux handles memory allocations
> > (specifically look into vm.overcommit_memory and vm.overcommit_ratio).  For
> > modern Linux systems with large amounts of RAM, a good rule of thumb is to
> > have 2GB of swap.
> 
> Did you get to the part about how I have installed a daemon to
> dynamically add swap *files* as required?
> 
> The main use for a swap partition today is hibernation. It's a server.
> I don't hibernate servers. I don't hibernate desktops, either. So I
> don't put swap partitions on servers or desktops.
> 
> Most modern PCs have more RAM fitted than they will ever need anyway.
> 8GB is the norm, 16GB is becoming frequent. Unless someone has very
> specific needs (e.g. editing very large media files, running multiple
> VMs), this is more RAM than most will ever require. On such systems,
> swap is an anachronism.

Swap files are a reasonable replacement for swap partitions.  I would
still agree with Christofer that some nominal amount of swap is wise,
though, and I always ensure that I have some enabled.  If nothing else,
you might as well be using that RAM for more buffer cache rather than
for the working set of some rarely-scheduled process.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]