babu walad
However, perhaps I didn't phrase my query clearly enough because I didn't get a single direct response to it, namely, can I create a single swap partition greater than 2GB in size?
Please, have a look at my original posting once more. You *can* create a swap partition larger then 2 GiB but then only 2 GiB can be used by Linux 2.4 on an i386 architecture. Also note that according to IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) and NIST (The National Institute of Standards and Technology, http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html) 1 GiB (gibi byte) = 1024*1024*1024 B and 1 GB (giga byte) = 1000*1000*1000 B. In this sense, you can create and use a partition larger then 2GB since the limit is 2 GiB. The original posting (swap area means swap partition there): : See "man mkswap": : : The maximum useful size of a swap area now depends on the : architecture. It is roughly 2GiB on i386, PPC, m68k, ARM, 1GiB on : sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on alpha and 3TiB on sparc64.
I do think the SuSE default of 128MB is way to low. Since most modern PCs support about 3GB of memory, I don't think 2G-6G is unreasonable.
Though I see some benefits of having swap larger then RAM I prefer to consider the total amount of virtual memory required on the system for swap size estimation. For instance, my diskless cluster nodes have 512 MiB of RAM and no swap. Thus I don't see 128 MB as a way too low value. -- Alexandr.Malusek@imv.liu.se