Linux-kernel mailing list archive 2000-02,: Re: Big Swap...

# Re: Big Swap...

Robert Dinse (nanook@eskimo.com)
Fri, 14 Jan 2000 09:57:28 -0800 (PST)

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On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Andreas Bombe wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 11:31:44PM -0800, Robert Dinse wrote:
> >
> > I thought I remembered seeing something here a while back about a utility
> > to make large swap partitions.
>
> The 128MB limitation is obsolete. You need a newer mkswap.
>
> [andreasb@storm andreasb]$ /sbin/mkswap --version
> mkswap from util-linux-2.10d
>
> According to the man page:
>
> The maximum useful size of a swap
> area now depends on the architecture. It is roughly 2GB
> on i386, PPC, m68k, ARM, 1GB on sparc, 512MB on mips,
> 128GB on alpha and 3TB on sparc64.

I installed a newer make swap, made a larger partition, did a mkswap on
it (which didn't complain), then attempted a swapon /dev/sdb1 (the partition
in question) and got the following:

/sbin/swapon /dev/sdb1
swapon: /dev/sdb1: Invalid argument

So I traced the program to see what it was bitching about:

stat("/dev/sdb1", {st_mode=S_IFBLK|0600, st_rdev=makedev(8, 17), ...}) = 0
swapon("/dev/sdb1") = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)

The swapon call returns EINVAL; according to the man page for the swapon
system call:

EINVAL is returned if path exists, but is neither a regu-
lar path nor a block device.

However this IS a block device:

# file /dev/sdb1
/dev/sdb1: block special (8/17)

I installed the disk-utils from the new linux-utils package as well as
the new swapon. But I've tried with the old swapon and get the same thing;
I've tried v0 and v1 swap and get the same thing. I don't know what I've done
but I don't think it's good!

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