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Old 04-12-2022, 10:55 AM   #31
marav
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swap or not, it's not a question of "problems" or issues or whether things will go wrong.
This is about how the system handles the memory

Read the post of Jan K
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ml#post6345416

Last edited by marav; 04-12-2022 at 11:03 AM.
 
Old 04-12-2022, 02:20 PM   #32
Jan K.
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Nah, that article is written by the one of the kernel memory management guys, so what does he know?

The conclusion btw...

Quote:
Swap is a useful tool to allow equality of reclamation of memory pages, but its purpose is frequently misunderstood, leading to its negative perception across the industry. If you use swap in the spirit intended, though – as a method of increasing equality of reclamation – you'll find that it's a useful tool instead of a hindrance.

Disabling swap does not prevent disk I/O from becoming a problem under memory contention, it simply shifts the disk I/O thrashing from anonymous pages to file pages. Not only may this be less efficient, as we have a smaller pool of pages to select from for reclaim, but it may also contribute to getting into this high contention state in the first place.

Swap can make a system slower to OOM kill, since it provides another, slower source of memory to thrash on in out of memory situations – the OOM killer is only used by the kernel as a last resort, after things have already become monumentally screwed. The solutions here depend on your system:

You can opportunistically change the system workload depending on cgroup-local or global memory pressure. This prevents getting into these situations in the first place, but solid memory pressure metrics are lacking throughout the history of Unix. Hopefully this should be better soon with the addition of refault detection.

You can bias reclaiming (and thus swapping) away from certain processes per-cgroup using memory.low, allowing you to protect critical daemons without disabling swap entirely.
 
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Old 04-13-2022, 04:39 AM   #33
amikoyan
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jan K. View Post
An interesting read, thank you Jan K.

On Chris Down's website:https://chrisdown.name/
It says:
Quote:
I'm a kernel developer and SRE, primarily working on Linux memory management.
So I guess he knows what he's talking about.
 
Old 04-13-2022, 05:22 AM   #34
marav
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bassmadrigal View Post
Wait, so your reason to not use swap is because saves more power?
My English is probably not very clear...
But what I said (or wanted to say) is:
I use swap because I use hibernation.
And because of power saving, hibernation is not an option for me

I don't see any reason not to use swap anyway (cf. Jan K. post & link)
 
Old 04-13-2022, 05:44 PM   #35
bassmadrigal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by marav View Post
And because of power saving, hibernation is not an option for me
This sentence is basically saying what I asked about before. What this sentence comes across as is you can't use hibernation ("hibernation is not an option for me") because of power saving.

It doesn't seem like that is your intention behind the sentence...
 
Old 04-13-2022, 06:03 PM   #36
marav
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bassmadrigal View Post
This sentence is basically saying what I asked about before. What this sentence comes across as is you can't use hibernation ("hibernation is not an option for me") because of power saving.

It doesn't seem like that is your intention behind the sentence...
hmm, not really. At least, that's not what I wanted to say
"is not an option" means "is mandatory"

in any case, in French that's what it means

Last edited by marav; 04-13-2022 at 06:04 PM.
 
Old 04-13-2022, 08:07 PM   #37
dhalliwe
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Aah, the complications of translation and idioms.

In English, "not an option" usually means "can't do that" or "that choice is not available".

"Not optional" would be closer to "mandatory". "Optional" meaning "do not have to", so negation in "not optional" means "have to".
 
Old 04-14-2022, 01:50 AM   #38
bassmadrigal
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Quote:
Originally Posted by marav View Post
hmm, not really. At least, that's not what I wanted to say
"is not an option" means "is mandatory"

in any case, in French that's what it means
If you've ever seen Apollo 13 in English, you'll understand the differences with the phrase.

In the movie, Gene Kranz, the flight director in Houston states, "Failure is not an option." meaning, we can't fail or our people up there die. We definitely don't want "Failure is mandatory."

Here's a timestamped link to the specific quote, but the entire scene is great to watch.

Sorry, I didn't intend for this to turn into an English lesson
 
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Old 04-14-2022, 09:13 AM   #39
dhalliwe
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I know I'm new here, but I think that the occasional friendly English lesson in an effort to help each other understand and communicate better is not a Bad Thing. Much better than degenerating into a flame war because someone took something differently than intended.
 
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Old 04-14-2022, 12:51 PM   #40
marav
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dhalliwe View Post
I know I'm new here, but I think that the occasional friendly English lesson in an effort to help each other understand and communicate better is not a Bad Thing. Much better than degenerating into a flame war because someone took something differently than intended.
No flame war here

Mr. bassmadrigal knows very well that the meaning of a sentence can be different in two states of his own country, so with a different country, culture, etc. the different levels of understanding are logical

Quote:
Originally Posted by bassmadrigal View Post
"Failure is not an option." meaning, we can't fail or our people up there die. We definitely don't want "Failure is mandatory."
And to conclude on this point:
to keep the negation (because failure is a "negative" word), and the meaning:
failure is not an option ==> no failure is mandatory
ditto for:
miss the target is not an option => hit the target is mandatory

Last edited by marav; 04-14-2022 at 01:06 PM.
 
Old 04-14-2022, 06:37 PM   #41
rknichols
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There are many ambiguities in language. The statement "xxx is not an option" can equally be taken to mean:
  1. We absolutely must achieve xxx. Everything depends on it. Or,
  2. Since there is no possibility of doing xxx, we must find another way to achieve our goal.
Here's another favorite of mine: "We only do xxx in the Winter," which could mean either:
  1. Service xxx is not offered except during the Winter, or
  2. During the Winter, the only service we offer is xxx.
Sometimes you can't know which was meant without knowing which was meant (or at least which is the more likely interpretation).
 
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Old 04-14-2022, 09:10 PM   #42
Pithium
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The word marav is looking for is "optional".
  1. Suspend/Resume is not an option because it consumes power even while sleeping.
  2. Hibernate does not use power and is your best option.
  3. If no other power management systems offer 0% power utilization and you require a power saving solution for your use case, then we can conclude that Hibernation is not optional.

The "failure is not an option" idiom does not apply to this situation and is generally used as a "call to arms" in competitive scenarios. E.g. Russia has more tanks, but failure is not an option!

[removed]


Quote:
Originally Posted by marav View Post
No flame war here

Mr. bassmadrigal knows very well that the meaning of a sentence can be different in two states of his own country...
LOL that made my day. Spent the whole bus ride home chuckling to myself.
 
Old 04-15-2022, 02:22 AM   #43
chrisretusn
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As usual this thread has been dragged off to off topic land.

In summary, "Is it possible to install Slackware without swap?" Yes it is possible to install Slackware without a swap.
 
Old 04-15-2022, 08:34 AM   #44
dhalliwe
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To continue with the language disambiguation, but also staying on topic...

Quote:
In summary, "Is it possible to install Slackware without swap?" Yes it is possible to install Slackware without a swap
The initial question asks about a possibility: can XXX be done (or not), which has a yes/no answer. Either it can, or it can't.

Reading between the lines, one might think that the actual question being asked is "Is it a good idea to install Slackware without swap?". This still leaves much ambiguity, because "good idea" is not an objective fact, it is an opinion. What might seem like a good idea to one person may seem like a bad idea to another - either due to simple preferences, or due to additional unknown differences is setup or use.

Adding more interpretation, you could answer the question "What are the advantages or disadvantages of installing Slackware without swap?", but this is only a useful question if the answer to the original question is "yes'. At this point, the question allows one to collect information, hopefully to be able to make up one's own mind about "is it a good idea?".

And when the original question leaves ambiguity, and people ask for more information so that they can help answer the correct version, the person that originally asked is best off to realize the ambiguity and clarify.

I think in this thread, we've seen the answers to "can you?", "Is it a good idea?", and "what are the advantages/disadvantages?". Constructive dialog.
 
Old 04-18-2022, 03:41 AM   #45
arubin
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As the original poster I was asking "Is it possible". Having installed slackware many times I am familiar with the stage of setting up swap and I wanted to know if it was possible to skip that swap stage entirely.

Having said that I did appreciate all the discussion about the wisdom of doing so and perhaps sub-consciously I had this question in mind as well.
 
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