On Wed, Jun 7, 2017 at 7:08 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Reddit, someone asked me if there are plans to switch to swap files > (as Ubuntu has) rather than making a partition by default. Do we have > any such plans? It seems like a small manageability benefit with not > much downside (other than, of course, the cost of changing things). Conventional swapfiles use bmap() which won't work on Btrfs. There's some two+ year old patches to get Btrfs to use wwap-over-NFS, but I don't know the status of that work. There were some usability concerns because it means no snapshotting of the swapfile or containing subvolume, and as a special case it was considered confusing. Anyway I asked on the Btrfs list today to see what the status of that is, and of an idea I have for a work around for the usability concern. I don't see in anaconda support for swap files. So it'd have to learn about them, and then either provide a UI for them, or only offer swapfiles via automatic partitioning and only on ext4 and XFS. I'm not sure what the up side is of swapfiles. If there were a daemon that dynamically created them when needed, then there wouldn't be such a waste of space for something that's not used much. And conversely if used, then multiple swapfiles can be dynamically created (I think up to 32 swap devices are possible), and then cleaned up once no longer needed. But we don't have such a thing so it's a fixed size allocation whether swap file or swap partition. I'm not seeing the advantage. -- Chris Murphy _______________________________________________ desktop mailing list -- desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
