more on unix swap space problem

[Chris Torek]

In article <171 at larry.sal.wisc.edu> jwp at larry.sal.wisc.edu
(Jeffrey W Percival) writes:
[BSDish system]
>The Question:  is the :sw: entry in fstab truly needed, or is
>the swap info compiled into the kernel?

Both.

The kernel has compiled into it the list of devices it *might ever*
swap on.  Initially, it swaps/pages/allocates_backing_store_from only
the first; the others are added with the vswapon() system call, made by
/etc/swapon, which is normally run as

	swapon -a

from /etc/rc.  With -a, swapon reads fstab to find :sw: entries and
calls vswapon() with the devices found in this way.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 7163)
Domain:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu	Path:	uunet!mimsy!chris