Re: striped swapping?

Albert Cahalan (albert@ccs.neu.edu)
Mon, 29 Apr 1996 17:52:38 -0400 (EDT)


>>>> If I have two swap partitions on two separate hard drives
>>>> (on separate busses) under linux is the swapper clever enough
>>>> to strip (even corsely) bewteen them? (I'm guessing you _can_
>>>> have more than one swap partition active at once).
>>>
>>> Yes, IF you are using the new swapon from util-linux-2.5 or
>>> later, AND you use the new priority flags to give both your
>>> swap partitions the same priority.
>
>> Hi! I have been using the MD (multiple device) driver to have a swap
>> partition over two disks. Does it mean it is not necessary anymore to
>> use the MD driver for striped swapping?
>
> Yes, that's what I said. Swap striping has been around in 1.3 for FAR
> longer than md has been stable for.

Swap striping looks obsolete to me. The md driver gives you
more options. It lets you put partitions together so that
they have the same priority and are in physical order, or lets you
stripe them with the right stripe size. It is more important
for the swap code to give the correct priority, and the easiest
way to do this is with swapon order.

I think many people have a swap partition plus an extra swap file
or a swap partition on a busy/slow disk. I don't think striped
swap is good for most people.

I'd like to let md do it's job (striping) and let the swap
code do it's job (priority).