Initial request :" ...for future reference can someone inform me of the pros and cons of a swap slice vs a swapfile on a mounted slice" First of all "Thank You" to all who have given me such great advice, opinions and facts: Rich Kulawiec Michael T Pins Brett Lymn Russell C Page Sandor Orban Warren Powell Eugene Schmidt JV Anthony A. D. Talltree Kevin Buterbaugh Jose Luis Martinez Tim Chipman Craig Touchton Orville M. Lewis Reggie Beavers WC Jones Steven Haywood Suggested Reading: man pages on dumpadm Unix Introduction Manuals RE:filesystems and virtual memory Suggested commands: dumpadm swap -l swap -s cat /etc/vfstab The consensus of opinions is that a dedicated swap slice is faster than a swapfile on a filesystem slice. This agrees with everything I have learned in SUN Solaris training classes. The most negative affect that was discussed is that there is a belief that during a kernel dump there would be no write to the swapfile and it is believed that SUN recommends that you have a swap partition to catch kernel dumps. This can be interpreted to be backed up by SUN if you read the dumpadm man pages. AND NOW FOR SOME FACTS: While receiving responses as an experiment I built one V240 WITHOUT a swap slice and WITHOUT a swapfile. I used slice 0 as root, slice 4 as a data area that could contain a swapfile and slice 5 as a future data area. I have 512 MB of ram and a 36gig hard disk divided equally amongst the slices. I installed Solaris 9, August 2003 release using the RSC feature via Ethernet and a local DVD on the V240. When the system completed the installation it rebooted without a problem which left me wondering how it could do that without a swap area. Solaris 1 or SunOS 4.X used to have a problem if you tried that. Upon investigation I used the command swap -l and discovered as expected there was no swap device configured. Then I used the command swap -s and found I had about 400meg of swap space available and 23meg was being used. Further investigation indicated that the system had automatically set up /tmp and /var/run as the swap areas each with 375 meg of space that it could use. The vfstab indicated that a swap area had been set up using tmpfs on /tmp. So the basic info is that it can be built without a swap slice or a swapfile and the installation procedure will take over and create a bootable system using the above areas. The system functions reasonably and whether it will create a dumpfile of value for the kernel, etc. is not known. Thanks to everyone for the input which I strongly value. I hope my experiment returns some useful information to each of you. Paul Mangan mangan@sprynet.com paul.mangan@heidelberg.com _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Wed Nov 5 10:28:31 2003
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Mar 03 2016 - 06:43:23 EST