local disk partitions (was Re: Swap size for large memory machines)

[Romain Kang]

The current revision of conf.c attempts to make life easier for sites
with local disk partitions.  Adding the keyword "LOCALDISKPART" to the
MAKESYS file causes inclusion of "../conf/dkpart.c" (with your local
partitions) and "../conf/dkauto.c" (with dktype-to-dkpart mappings)
when you compile conf.c.  These files are not clobbered by PTFs.

If you are in the midst of an upgrade process, of course, you cannot
easily put your /usr on a nonstandard partition.  If you *really* want
to avoid re-copying /usr to its final resting place, you can use a
virtual disk to define the /usr paritition, then use a modified
load_usr script that knows about vdisks.  Of course, you could use
vdisks everywhere anyway, except for swapping.

(This is probably obvious to anyone who likes local partitions.  Me,
I'm one of those crazies who still prefers disk partitions no more than
150 MB each, so that any partition can be backed up to a single 6250
bpi 9-track tape.)

A comment on the original swapping question:  OSx 4.4 and earlier uses
the BSD VM system, which I seem to remember, was intended to be run
with a RAM-to-swap ratio of 1:4 on VAX 750's with 512KB of main
memory.  OSx 5.0 uses SVr3 VM, which no longer requires backing swap
for every process space in the system.  In the absurd case, someone
with light system usage and 256MB of main memory will never touch even
the 30MB default swap partition.  One thinks, however, that someone
with that much money would probably spend it on something more
interesting than excess RAM.
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