[TriLUG] rhel 3.0 es swap partition over 2.0 gb

[Kevin Flanagan]

On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 23:03, Kevin Flanagan wrote:

Well, a bit of searching, trying out alltheweb.com, found a statement in
a resume.

"Enhanced AMASS to eliminate 2GB swap file size limit on all platforms."
See http://home.earthlink.net/~billkindel/resume.html

So, could be that this was an arbitrary decision made by more than one
person years apart.  

Either way, multiple 2GB swap partitions should provide all you can
handle.  I'd like to have the problem of working on a system that was so
busy it needs that kind of swap space.  ;')



Kevin

> On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 21:35, Marty Ferguson wrote:
> 
> I think that there's something else here, perhaps it is the 32 bit arch,
> I seem to recall that as a limit with other Operating Systems, older
> than Windows too....  ;')  I want to say that 2GB limit was in VMS going
> a long ways back, but am not sure.  Perhaps google, or the wayback
> machine will help.  Off I go, digging through the archives.
> 
> 
> 
> Kevin
> 
> > When Linus rewrote swapping for the {I think it was) 2.2 kernel release,
> > I imagine that he figured 2G was plenty.  Also, the limit is _per_ swap
> > partition,
> > which is limited to like 8 or 16 (I think I believe I recall I suppose)
> > I've never used more than 3 swap partitions simultaneously, all declared in
> > /etc/fstab.
> > So, assuming the limit on the number of partitions is 8, that still allows
> > for a total of 16G of swap space.
> > 
> > The increase to 2G was a big deal at the time, and there were
> > significant improvements other than just the increased size limit.
> > You are correct - It is indeed a 32bit address space limitation.
> > 
> > I'm sure you can google and get lots of interesting historic information
> > using the site: search option for Linux World and such.
> > This was all happening circa back in the day when Jim Ray was into Whorled
> > Peas.
> > 
> > Marty
> > 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org]On
> > Behalf Of J Hays
> > Sent: Thursday, April 01, 2004 8:54 PM
> > To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
> > Subject: Re: [TriLUG] rhel 3.0 es swap partition over 2.0 gb
> > 
> > 
> > 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
> > 
> > 
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