On Wednesday 26 May 2004, conor.daly at oceanfree.net (Conor Daly) wrote:
>On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 11:06:15PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
>Paul Jakma thought:
>>>> For multi-disk setups i create a RAID1 array for swap.
>>I understood that swap would be automatically striped across multiple swap
>partitions and, even if one of the swap partitions fails, the remaining
>partitions would carry on.
Not unless you use the auto-raid-swap module, which is yet to be written. If
you use multiple swap partitions, your swap space is indeed distributed across
all those partitions, athough I don't know if the term striped would be
accurate.
However, this does not lead to any level of redundancy. If part of a process
is paged out to swap partition A, which then has an unrecoverable error, then
that process will dump core when it tries to swap the missing pages back in.
However, with swap on a RAID-1 device, you're insulated from the effects of a
single disk failure, and as a bonus you'll have slightly faster swapping too.
Niall
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
