[TriLUG] rhel 3.0 es swap partition over 2.0 gb

[J Hays]

Marvin Blackburn wrote:

> What are the consequences of a swap partition over 2.0 gb.
> I know that Redhat says it each partion should be < 2.0.
> Is this just wasted space, or can problems occur.
> 
> ------------------
> Marvin Blackburn
> Systems Administrator
> Glen Raven
> "He's no failure.  He's not dead yet" --William Lloyd George

I'd be interested in any information on this as well. That 2 GB 
swap space ceiling rings a bell.

A few years ago I worked for a Sun reseller and our most senior 
Sun engineer repeatedly warned customers and junior admins (like 
me) that creating a single swap partition over 2 GB (in Solaris) 
was asking for trouble. I seem to recall some actual problems 
manifesting on a customer's high-end Sun system (I think it was a 
Sun E6500, with 8 or 10 GB of memory) under heavy load. The 
problems were cured by changing the single, large swap partition 
into a 2 GB swap partition plus a swap file. The customer 
resisted implementing the proposed solution because there was 
little documentation of this limit on docs.sun.com, but we 
finally found something - not an explanation of why - just a 
published warning against exceeding 2 GB on the swap partition.

It makes me wonder if there could be some intrinsic problem with 
  2GB as the size of the swap file (something to do with 32-bit 
addressable space?) or perhaps Linux engineers merely copied the 
limitations in the UNIX code, or something else ...

Jonathan