[vox-tech] Partitioning scheme

[Samuel Merritt]

Quoting Rick Moen <rick@linuxmafia.com>
> Quoting Ehrhart, Jay (ehrhart@ycoe.org):
> 
> > Striping the swap file will improve performance since it is writing to
> > multiple disks at the same time.
> 
> You may already know this, but the Linux swapper process already has
> inherently within it the ability to split swap activity between
> drive spindles.  Therefore, I strongly doubt there's any point in
> striping / spanning one's swap partitions. 

>From what I know of the kernel, it's a Bad Idea to put swap on any sort of
software RAID volume. The reason is that Linux's RAID layer sometimes needs
to allocate some memory, which can cause paging if physical RAM is full. If
a swapfile is on a software RAID volume, then attempting to swap a page to
disk can cause the RAID layer to try to grab memory, which results in an
attempt to swap a page to disk, ad infinitum.

Of course, if one has a hardware RAID controller, none of this applies.