Interesting. Can you say more about why a partition is superior to a file for swap?
All calls to manipulate a swap-file have to go through the file-system stack of system calls...this means that you've got the overhead of whichever filesystem you're using. Things such as access-control checks, disk-space quotas, and the possiblity of having it scattered across the surface of the disk. With a raw partition, you remove one layer (or possibly more, depending on how convoluted your file system is) which helps speed things up. A raw partition also keeps everything contiguous so that accesses are faster. Some of the more modern FS's should help cut back on this a bit...I think ReiserFS (among others) works hard to keep things quite contiguous, so you may not see the same gains there, as perhaps with something a little older (like FAT or ext2).
Oracle (and perhaps other RDBMS's) makes use of this same aspect--using a raw partition for faster disk access--to obviate the need the overhead of the file system.
In theory, you could exacerbate the matter by mounting a compressed partition, and then, inside of that, creating your swap file. This would then have the overhead of not only two file-systems, but the added overhead of decompressing.
Hopefully that makes a bit of sense? It's 5:00 here at the end of a long day, and time for me to head home. (grins)
-tim
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