RE: A note on the 5.12-rc1 tag

[David Laight]

...
> > Historically swap was a partition and larger than physical memory.
> > This allows simple 'dump to swap' on panic (for many disk types).
> > But I've not seen that support in linux.
> 
> I know.  We started with lots of small partitions, but nowadays the
> distros wan't to install everything in a single[*] partition, even swap.

Multiple partitions is partially do to the size of disks.

But I prefer to install the 'system' in one partition and put all
my own files in a different one.
Then I can install a different version of the OS into a 3rd
partition and be able to boot different versions.

Many years ago I updated NetBSD's x86 mbr code to read the
extended partition table so you could choose to read the
next level boot from sector zero of any partition.
Squeezing that into the ~400 bytes available is a masterpiece.

[*] The 'single partition' is a simplicity cop-out.

	David

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