On 17/06/19 04:37, Grant Taylor wrote: > On 6/16/19 7:02 PM, Wols Lists wrote: >> So you didn't read what I wrote ... Par for the course :-( > > I did. I still hear people say it today. It's not old as in past tense. > >> The basic Unix mechanism needs twice ram. > > I disagree. > >> It's inherent in the design of the thing. Whether linux no longer uses >> the Unix mechanism, or it's had the hell optimised out of it I don't >> know. >> >> Either way, machines today get by on precious little swap - that's fine. >> >> Historic note - the early linux 2.4 vanilla kernels enforced the twice >> ram rule - a lot of people who didn't read the release notes got nasty >> shocks when their machines locked up the moment they touched swap ... > > I disagree because I ran 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, and 2.6 kernels without swap > being twice the ram or greater. Swap did get used. They did not crash > when accessing swap. > Did you run VANILLA 2.4? (None of the distro kernels carried those particular changes, for obvious reasons :-)
You want proof? Look at the release notes for - I believe - 2.4.10? Or look at LWN in that time frame. It was quite big news at the time - people were upgrading to Linus' latest kernel and systems were falling over. You're making the classic logical mistake of "it's not true for me therefore it can't be true". It wasn't true for me either, but I lived through the news-storm and remember it ... Cheers, Wol
