On Fri, Jun 13, 2003 at 12:32:24PM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
>
> Incidentally, Red Hat as of about 7.0 began insisting on swap space at least
> as large as twice RAM size. In my case on my 512MB RAM notebook, that meant
> it wanted 1GB swap. If you upgrade your RAM you could get into trouble. In
> that case, you create a swap file on one of your other partitions that the
> kernel can use.
RedHat's position may be influenced by the fact that, AFAIR, they use
the Rik van Riel virtual memory system which is inclusive--i.e., you need
at least as much swap as you have physical memory before you really have
any virtual memory at all. This was fixed by the competing Andrea
Arcangeli system, which became standard for the Linux kernel around
2.4.10 or so.
Jeroen