as the title says, i would like to know which
partition type my swap partition is, since if
it is not ext3 nor reiserfs, i can disable ext3
kernel support and trim it a bit further.

thanks in advance.

swap file or partition does not contain a filesystem ,but the word is that you could turn swap into a filesystem made for swap called swapfs.Swap is where 'pages' of memory is stored ,if it fills up the memory.Memory management falls under a special branch of the OS and is one of the most important part.Swap space can be a dedicated swap partition , a swap file, or a combination of swap partitions and swap files.

AFAIK, swap has its own "filesystem" called swap, hence the reason you must use the command mkswap when you are creating a swap partition, when you are creating it by hand with fdisk. Usually your distro's installer does this for you. You can disable ext3 support with no worries concerning swap.

fdisk -l will display it if it's correctly created (filesystem type 82 I believe?)

Cool

Well very much ,I think that you are confusing the term swap space with filesystem.mkswap creates a swap space not a filesystem.Anyway ,according to my OS book,Swapping is usually done direct to a raw partition (directory hierarchy is irrelevant). In Solaris swapping is done to a combination of raw partitions and files (most local machines have 1 swap partition).But as I said swapfs is the new thing,it is mostly used for a temporary storage in windows machines but using the raw linux swap partition.The partitions are differenciated by the partition id,and so swap also have a partition id,in this way the linux os differenciates another partition with swap space.

Ok the id of swap partition is 82

and masterC swap is not a filesystem fdisk is looking at the partition id only

Thanks!

Cool

Solaris has been using the swapfs concept for quite some time now. By default Solaris puts /tmp in swap unless you create a separate slice for it.

thank you all for the replies. i will recompile
my kernel now without ext3 support

stickman thanks for the info,you see I don't use solaris,never even touched a machine with that os running, and I have no idea whatsoever about solaris(except what I have read ,and that's peanuts),I don't even know whether the kernel is microkernel or monolithic(like linux).
(and MasterC you're welcome ,I am pretty sure that this must be a unique day when I am telling a mod(and someone with 8600 posts) something that they do not know)

reporting back from my kernel recompile;
it works like a charm. thanks all.