eight swap partitions?

linuxtesting2 · 07-20-2004, 03:38 AM

Is eight swap partitions the maximum, combined with 4gb on an x86 system. And how big can one swap partition be, is it 2gb?

-ole

MS3FGX · 07-20-2004, 04:24 AM

Why would you want so much swap?

You would never even be able to use 2 GB of swap, let alone 16 GB.

linuxtesting2 · 07-20-2004, 04:39 AM

i dont need so much swap space

reading about lpi certification, and i have an old book. So i was wondering about the swap space, if it possible with todays kernel to have more.

-ole

bigrigdriver · 07-20-2004, 04:58 AM

I'd guess that it is possible to have more swap space: but you don't need to have it divided into more that one partition. Even if you have 20 different distributions installed, you only need 1 swap partition because you can only have one OS up and running and it needs only 1 swap pattition. You may, if you choose, to also have additional swap space dedicated from within the /root partition. Generally, the swap partition is set equal to, or in some multiple of, the amount of ram you have to work with.

linuxtesting2 · 07-20-2004, 05:37 AM

i know i dont need more than e.x 2xram. But i was wondering how much the kernel support, is it 2gb, 4gb, 8gb ..... ?

-ole

slackist · 07-20-2004, 05:56 AM

from this article:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwork...-swaptip2.html

Quote:

x86 2 Gigabytes
PowerPC 2 Gigabytes
Motorola 680x0 2 Gigabytes
Sparc 1 Gigabyte
MIPS 512 Megabytes
Alpha 128 Gigabytes
UltraSparc 3 Terabytes

but I don't know how old the article is as it refers to 2.2.x+ kernels
HTH
mark

slackist · 07-20-2004, 05:59 AM

Oops, spoke too soon,

http://www.redhatconfig.com/msg/75064.html

Quote:

Maximum total size is 64GB of swap (both 2.4.x and 2.6.x IIRC). Maximum
number of swapfiles is 32 (on RHEL3, see ./include/linux/swap.h).

mark

linuxtesting2 · 07-20-2004, 06:15 AM

ok, thats a lot of swap

Thanks for helping all!

-ole