[vox-tech] Three Install Questions

[Ken Herron]

Wilson Shealy wrote:

>1.  Are there any disadvantages (except disk space) to having an oversized Swap partition?  I've decided to double mine so that I can double my RAM at a future date.
>  
>
No, not really. You can configure as much swap as you like. Since you 
have so much, you might be interested in a way you can use it to make 
your system more efficient.

The idea is to use tmpfs for your /tmp directory. tmpfs is a filesystem 
that uses virtual memory for data storage, so any files created in /tmp 
would be stored in memory and swapped to disk just like process data. 
This provides three benefits:

   1. Many file operations will just update memory, without ever hitting
      the disk even to write to a journal. "Small" files with "short"
      lifetimes may never hit the disk at all.
   2. You're writing less to the / partition, which generally improves
      its chances of surviving events like power failures.
   3. Allocating a lot of VM, or storing data in /tmp, are just two
      models for a process to use disk space for temporary data storage.
      By using swap space for /tmp, you're letting both models draw from
      one big pool of disk space, instead of having to allocate space
      for two smaller pools.

Solaris uses this technique by default. I've been using it on my 
personal Linux systems for a few years with no trouble.

>2.  Could the use of the Reiser FS be somehow tripping up the boot method?
>  
>
Offhand, one problem would be if your kernel loads reiserfs from a 
module instead of having it built in.