Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (3156 mails)

[Aaron Kulkis <akulkis00@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jc Polanycia wrote:
> On Tuesday 04 December 2007 10:02:45 Matthew Stringer wrote:
> > On Tuesday 04 December 2007 15:27:06 James Knott wrote:
> > > Matthew Stringer wrote:
> > > > I don't normally SoftRAID the swap partitions as it would be faster
> > > > just to have multiple ones instead (you're not limited to one).
> > > Given one of the goals of RAID is to keep the system running when a
> > > drive fails,  what happens when a drive containing swap croaks?
> > Your available swap space would be reduced, doesn't cause the system to
> > fail.
>
> Actually it can cause the system to fail, depending on what was swapped to 
> the device that failed.  At the very least applications that had pages 
> swapped to the failed swap device would crash.

They won't crash... because they can't resume execution...
a process which hits a page that's swapped to a device
which no longer functions will simply halt on I/O, waiting
forever (literally) for the next page of code or data to
get swapped back in.

On the other hand, if the kernel has swapped out some data,
and can't bring it back, THAT can cause a system crash.


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