On 1/17/2011 8:42 PM, William Kenworthy wrote:
No swap contains pages from memory that have not been accessed for awhile so they can be stored elsewhere freeing ram for actual active pages. When they need to be accessed, they have to be swapped back in, and often something swapped back out to make room for it. And for those with gigabytes of swap, keep in mind that the majority of processors can only access up to 32 x 2G swapfiles under linux, so 4G is only going to be half used. Some processors are only able to handle very small swapfiles, whilst amd opterons can handle very large ones. It does appear however that some distros (redhat and suse ?) have modified something to allow larger swap sizes on 64bit systems, but via google it seems very muddy at the moment. On my mostly 32bit systems its only the opterons (which are running 64bit systems) that can access more than 2G swap using gentoo-sources kernels when I tested late last year. BillK
On a 32bit x86 Linux OS your swap file or swap partitions can have a max size of 2GB. If you're using a kernel later than 2.4.10 you can have 32 swap device and previous to that it was 8. With a 64bit Linux OS you can have swap devices of 64GB each.
kashani
