I have 256MB of RAM and have both Red Hat 9 and Win XP living on the same hdd.

Both require swap spaces. Can they share the same space/partition?

Isn't it an awful waste of space to devote nearly 1 GB for swap only?

No.
Linux Swap is the linux type
and I always thought that NT used swap files on their partition.
Anyway they are incompatible.

And 1GB total is a lot.
I't's highly unlikely that you'll really need that amount of swap space in total, you could probably get away with 250M-500M (as long as you are going to use it for normal use) if you are that concerned - as your machine seems fairly recent, if you did this though in future you might have to resize your disk - no big deal or just create a swap file for linux if you don't want to resize partitions.

(256 * 2 for Linux) + (256 * 2 for WinXP) = waste

:-(

repartion your swap space 1gb is not required for a 256MB RAM .
and win-xp can't share swap bcoz it's a linux type
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Q^R^ready ^### init sequence

I do understand your replies, i.e. possibly 512MB swap partition and the 512MB (I always change to static sized virtual mem in windows) swap FILE in windows.

Thanks.

What would happen in Linux if insufficient memory? Will it dump core? Abend?

There is a howto on sharing swap with Windows ( www.tldp.org ). You make a FAT32 partition and tell Windows to make it's swapfile there, then tell Linux to use the swapfile too.
As for what happens when there is insufficient memory, I think it just abruptly closes the memory hogging app.

1 GB is not a waste in windows unless you either have a tiny harddrive or never use any memory-intensive applications. With 768mb swap file in Windows, and 512mb ram, I've seen times when Win still had to resize (3D Studio Max was the culprit). In Linux I've never seen much swapping.

Thanks for the pointer.

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Swap-Space.html

I read about this ages ago but have not come across it lately. Back then, RAM size is quite small, requiring little swap space. However, the procedure looks very tedious. Is it possible to do this with WinXP?

--- from the how-to ---
What if the swap partition is a FAT32 ? No, you can't have a swap partition with a FAT32 file system. First of all, Linux can use a maximum of 128MB of swap space on a single swap partition. Thus, if your swap partition is larger than 128MB, you are wasting your disk space. And Windows will refuse to convert a partition of 128MB into a FAT32 file system.
-----

Is the max linux partition of 128MB still valid (say RH9)?

Nope. Max single swap partition size is 2GB. You can have up to 8 swap partitions or swap files for a total swap of 16GB.

The one time I ran out of memory due to a program with a memory leak the OS just crashed.

The amount of swap space is really dependent on what apps you run. For most desktop users 512mb is plenty. I've never tried to share swap between windows and linux. A linux swap partition is faster then a swap file and FAT32 isn't as efficient as a native linux filesystem. Unless you have a small hard drive 512mb isn't much space.