On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 07:52:59PM -0400, Jerry McAllister wrote: > On Tue, Sep 08, 2009 at 04:51:20PM -0500, Peter Steele wrote: > > > Are there any advantages to using mdconfig and creating a virtual disk for > > swap space as opposed to having a designated swap partition? For example, I > > could do something like this: > > Unless I am missing something basic here, it seems like a bad idea to > me - to carve out and use up some memory to use as extra storage for > processes that need more memory that you have taken away to give to swap. > That is self defeating. > > In addition, one use of swap is to write dumps to if there is a crash. > If you put it in memory, it is gone when you reboot.
He's talking about using a swap file, rather than a dedicated partition on the disk, not in RAM! Although it is slightly slower, as Chuck has already pointed out, it might, in certain circumstances, be a somewhat more convenient solution than repartitioning/reinstalling the whole system. And as RW has said, the facility already exists and can be enabled with a couple of knobs in /etc/rc.conf. Dan -- Daniel Bye _ ASCII ribbon campaign ( ) - against HTML, vCards and X - proprietary attachments in e-mail / \
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