> Neither swap or dump are mandatory for running Solaris.
Dump is mandatory in the sense that losing crash dumps is criminal.
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.
There have been a number of good suggestions here:
(1) The right way to size the dump device is to let dumpadm(1M) do it
based on the dump content type.
(2) In a virtualized environment, a better way to get a crash dump
would be to snapshot the VM. This would require a little bit
of host/guest cooperation, in that the installer (or dumpadm)
would have to know that it's operating in a VM, and the kernel
would need some way to notify the VM that it just panicked.
Both of these ought to be doable.
Jeff
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