swap space

[Jon M. Hanson]

On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 01:17:05PM -0700, Michael Havens wrote:
> I want to make use of my floppy disk; thus I wish to use it as my swap space. 
> How many bytes
> 
> I was wondering.... a flopy drive is very much useless. Why not use it as the 
> swap space?  If we were going to how many bytes/blocks are in a floppy?
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That's an extrodinarily bad idea. Your floppy drive is many times slower
than a hard drive (where swap is normally kept). It also doesn't have
nearly enough capacity to make it worth while as a swap device (even the
"super capacity" drive, which may or may not work in Linux). The
rule-of-thumb is that your swap space should be twice the amount of your
physical RAM (more than 2 GB is overkill). Also if you eject your swap
floppy and the kernel tries to swap something out you're looking at a
kernel panic.