Jeff Bonwick wrote: >> Neither swap or dump are mandatory for running Solaris. > > Dump is mandatory in the sense that losing crash dumps is criminal.
Agreed on that point, I remember all to well why I was in Sun Service the days when the first dump was always lost because savecore didn't used to be run! > Swap is more complex. It's certainly not mandatory. Not so long ago, > swap was typically larger than physical memory. But in recent years, > we've essentially moved to a world in which paging is considered a bug. > Swap devices are often only a fraction of physical memory size now, > which raises the question of why we even bother. On my desktop, which > has 16GB of memory, the default OpenSolaris swap partition is 2GB. > That's just stupid. Unless swap space significantly expands the > amount of addressable virtual memory, there's no reason to have it. What has alwyas annoyed me about Solaris (and every Linux distro I've ever used) is that unlike Windows and MacOS X we put swap management (devices and their size) into the hands of the admin. The upside of this though is that it is easy to mirror swap using SVM. Instead we should take it completely out of their hands and do it all dynamically when it is needed. Now that we can swap on a ZVOL and ZVOLs can be extended this is much easier to deal with and we don't lose the benefit of protected swap devices (in fact we have much more than we had with SVM). -- Darren J Moffat _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
