"Kerry Hoath" <kerry at gotss.net> writes: > There are advantages to having a swap partition. > Firstly, accessing a partition directly for virtual memory bypasses > file system overhead. You can just read/write pages to absolute > sectors on the partition. True, although I have read claims that under modern Linux kernels, it is no longer the case that swap partitions give higher performance than swap files. Regrettably I can't remember the details, but I assume that since space for the swap files is pre-allocated, the kernel now keeps track of where the sectors are on the device so that it doesn't have to invoke the file system when writing to the swap space. The other advantages mentioned are uncontroversially correct, though, as far as I know.
