new disk layout

[Bill Davidsen]

Tim wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-07-03 at 23:14 +0700, muhammad panji wrote:
>> 2 G of swap is enough
> 
> If you want to do suspend to disc, you need swap space at least as large
> as your RAM, as that's where it dumps a copy of memory to while
> suspending.
> 
Let me clarify a tad, this is a bit more complex than that...

In suspend to disk, see the output of the 'free' command. The data in the 
'buffers' and 'cached' need not be saved, the buffers are written to the 
filesystem and the cached data are discarded. So the room you really need is the 
swap in use plus the memory in use. And it gets more complex than that, because 
the memory is compressed as it's written out (more for speed than size, in 
practice), so it's really hard to guess how much swap will actually be used.

In practice I agree with you, because it's so hard to get it just right, that 
it's easier to just match memory size. That's a bit of a waste on a large 
system, where most of the memory is almost always in use for i/o rather than 
program, but it's safe.

> If you don't want to suspend to disc, then you can size your swap space
> according to other rules.
> 


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot