On 2015-03-15 18:13, Michael Havens wrote:
> I was wondering why Linux uses a swap partition rather than a swap
> file. I mean I would think a swap file would be superior since a
> file's size can fluctuate whereas a partition is static.
Historical reasons and performance. A partition is a contiguous area
of disk, while a file can be a widely-scattered area of blocks. The
kernel can also access a partition directly, while accessing a file
incurs unavoidable overhead of going through the filesystem kernel code.
This overhead is (almost) invisible in modern high-powered systems with
many G of RAM and CPUs >= 2 GHz. When 128M of RAM and 400 MHz of CPU
were what was available, people needed to be more concerned about
performance.
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