Re: [9fans] Kernel panic when allocating a huge memory

[steve <steve@quintile.net>]

if you use the 9front distribution swap works,
if you use the either 9atom or the labs distribution it does not.

the labs or erik may take the fixes from 9front but there are good reasons
for dropping swap all together - it is very slow, rarely used,
and ram is cheap these days.

i think this is a fair summary.

-Steve

On 3 Nov 2012, at 05:43, pmarin <pmarin.mail@gmail.com> wrote:

> To be clear, is the swap partition completely useless in Plan9?
> 
> pmarin.
> 
> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 9:28 PM, Charles Forsyth
> <charles.forsyth@gmail.com> wrote:
>> There's a non-trivial chance that what now goes wrong with paging
>> (which did once work, even if it isn't great) is a symptom of a bug
>> that afflicts the virtual memory code itself. (For instance, a page unlocked
>> during a critical period, a race, and so on.)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 2 November 2012 19:18, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Fri Nov  2 15:10:00 EDT 2012, skip.tavakkolian@gmail.com wrote:
>>>> it's by design:
>>>> http://9fans.net/archive/2006/07/229
>>>> 
>>>> -Skip
>>>> 
>>>> On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 10:36 AM, Pavel Klinkovsky
>>>> <pavel.klinkovsky@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>>> It really seems as a problem with swap. :(
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> this is well known, and solutions are available
>>>>>> even if you don't care to use them.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Oh, does it mean the official Plan 9 distribution contains non-working
>>>>> swap? :O
>>>>> It is clear I missed something...
>>>>> 
>>>>> Sorry for the noise.
>>> 
>>> i don't think that's quite fair to the current situation.  there
>>> was a swapper, and it's broken.  it should either be fixed or
>>> removed.  leaving the thing in in the state it's in (buffalo
>>> buffalo?) doesn't make any sense, and is as seperate from
>>> the question of whether to page (to disk) or not as, ahem, vm is from
>>> paging (to disk).
>>> 
>>> imo, swap needs to go.
>>> 
>>> - erik
>>