[gentoo-amd64] Re: Re: Late in the game Windows dual-boot question

[Duncan]

Peter Humphrey posted <200605020855.21021.prh@××××××××××.uk>, excerpted
below,  on Tue, 02 May 2006 08:55:20 +0100:

> On Monday 01 May 2006 13:09, Duncan wrote:
>
>> All that said, as I've mentioned a couple times now, on a single disk
>> system, there's a /huge/ cost in terms of access speed, to access swap.
>
> So, following a suggestion of yours some time ago, as I have 4 GB RAM in
> this box I compiled the kernel without swap code and ran without a swap
> partition. It seemed to work well, though I didn't run any proper tests.
> I've reverted to using swap more recently because I'm running the new
> vmware-server package, which seems to eat memory wholesale and I don't
> want to risk running out of space. I don't think swap space is actually
> being used though. So far.

Now that I've 8 gig of physical memory, I've seriously debated turning off
swap again.  The 4x4 gig striped swap is fast enough that using it isn't a
problem.  However, the suggestion you mention, that the swap code in the
kernel is a whole section of complex code that can be disabled and removed
from the kernel entirely if swap is disabled at compile time, is still
100% valid.  I haven't decided whether the small chance of actually using
swap justifies keeping swap in the kernel or not.  I suppose it doesn't,
and I'd certainly remove it if I didn't have the 4-way-striped swap, but
with the striped swap, I haven't decided.

Actually, the reason I re-enabled it again was to try swsusp, which writes
the memory image to the swap partition, so there has to be such a thing
and AFAIK swap has to be enabled, too. However, I've had decidedly mixed
results. Back with 2.6.15 (the last I tried), anyway, it seemed I /could/
suspend if I'd not activated either the network or X.  If I'd activated
one or either and then quit X and stopped the network, it would sometimes
work, sometimes not.

I should really try again with .17-rcX and the 8 gig memory, which I
didn't have back then either.  If I can get it working reliably, great,
that's a good reason to keep swap enabled.  If not, I should kill the
entire supporting infrastructure in the kernel, swsusp, CPU-hotplug
(necessary for swsusp on a dual CPU system), and swap as well.

The thing is finding the time and motivation to do it.  It takes quite
some patience, since testing it involves shutting the hardware down, and
seeing if it can successfully resume when I turn it back on.  If it
doesn't, that's a full boot sequence.  Even if not, it's a full BIOS
power-on sequence, and this BIOS has one VERY annoying
bug/feature/trait -- it insists on checking the floppy (and cd and dvd,
but floppy is the worst) on boot, even if I have the BIOS set to NOT check
it (and not boot from it).  That adds about 30 seconds to the boot
sequence right there, while the thing clicks away on the floppy.  (This
particular BIOS is on the Tyan site as a beta, not full release, but it
fixed a couple other things, so I wanted/needed it, even with this
irritating bug.)

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html


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