Re: [patch] large swap areas

Jakub Jelinek (jj@sunsite.ms.mff.cuni.cz)
Tue, 24 Feb 1998 17:44:06 +0100 (MET)

>
> Jakub said:
> > While you are at it, it would be good to handle disklabels inside of the
> > partition as well. At the moment it is not possible to have swap as first
> > partition on the disk on Sparc/UltraLinux boxes. First 512B of the disk
> > needs to be partition table (disklabel), next 512B have boot loader (in case
> > of SILO, Solaris boot loader takes 8K-512B).
>
> I'm not sure that it's a good solution. What happens if in the future another
> architecture has the same kind of problem ? What about changing the beginning
> of your swap partition (with fdisk) to avoid the disk label area ?
> How does the ext2 partition format deal with this problem ?

Well, if you change it with fdisk, then you loose a lot of disk space if you
want to have swap partition first, as you define partitions by starting
cluster and size, where cluster is often more than a megabyte.
ext2 deals with that very easily, like does ufs, iso9660, Solaris swap, ...
ext2 has first 1K reserved (that's why SILO needs to fit into 512B), ufs
first 8K, iso9660 first 32K, Solaris swap first 8K...
When another architecture has the same kind of problem? Then it can do that
the same way. The solution I was proposing had this decision whether to
support old swap format or not in userland completely, so mkswap could as
well have some argument which would tell it not to write old SWAP-SPACE
format and just the new one...

Cheers,
Jakub
___________________________________________________________________
Jakub Jelinek | jj@sunsite.mff.cuni.cz | http://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz
Administrator of SunSITE Czech Republic, MFF, Charles University
___________________________________________________________________
Ultralinux - first 64bit OS to take full power of the UltraSparc
Linux version 2.1.88 on a sparc64 machine (498.80 BogoMips).
___________________________________________________________________

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