Bug 43322

Summary:	RFE: Prefer swapfiles rather than swap partitions at install.
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Ed McKenzie <eem12>
Component:	anaconda	Assignee:	Brent Fox <bfox>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.1	Keywords:	FutureFeature
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Enhancement
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2001-07-03 20:15:13 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Ed McKenzie 2001-06-03 06:12:34 UTC

Enhancement Request: Create swapfiles rather than swap partitions at install.

Rationale:

1. Swapfiles can be resized without having to repartition.  Also, this
would make it possible to install RHL on dual-boot machines that for
various reasons don't support out-of-order partitions or strange booting
strategies.  (IMO, it should be possible to install RHL in a single
partition anywhere without having to repartition.)

2. AFAIK bad blocks that develop after mkswap can't be remapped.  This is
not the case for swap files.

3. The performance loss for using swapfiles is negligible.

(Of course, there's alot to be considered here -- e.g. if RedHat starts
shipping ext3, what happens to system performance if users enable -o
journal=data on root fs ... but I think this is definitely something to be
explored.)

Comment 1 Brent Fox 2001-07-03 20:15:10 UTC

I don't think we want to do this this time around.