FLASH disk as swap

[Matt Graham]

From: Stephen <cryptworks at gmail.com>
> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 7:50 AM, Alex Dean <alex at crackpot.org> wrote:
>> On Dec 3, 2009, at 4:40 AM, Marco Savo wrote:
>>> it is possible use a FLASH drive as SWAP?
>> Probably, but why would you want to?

Might as well ask "Why would you want to make a softRAID-5 out of
a bunch of USB floppy disks"?  "Because it's there" is a perfectly
valid answer.

>> A swap partition is its own kind thing.  It doesn't have a normal
>> filesystem.

Since all disks are supposed to be SCSI now, I don't know that you'd
want to waste one of your 15 partitions on a swap partition.  Though
I suppose you could put swap on an LV or on a file....

> I have run Linux desktops without swap and most of the time it was
> just fine.  given the large amount of cheap ram swap is generally
> not needed unless a program needs it for a graceful moment

Swap is much less useful than it once was.  However, when you need it,
you REALLY need it, or you have some sort of runaway Java app.  So I
usually do "dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=512 && mkswap
/swapfile" just so there's something there in case of stupidity.

-- 
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog:  http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see