[comp.sys.sun] Increasing Swap on a SUN 3 running 3.5

Rob.Montjoy@uc.edu (Robert C. Montjoy) (10/19/89)

Hi.

I need help getting the kernal to swap on the swap space I have allocated
on sun runnig 3.5 of the os. I had a spare partation on drive two which I
wanted to convert to use as swap. I have entry for the swap partation in
the fstab. Also, I have rebuilt the kernel with the following line for the
vmunix.

	vmunix root on sd0a swap on sd0b and sd2b

Any Ideas ?

mike@ists.ists.ca.ists.ca (Mike Clarkson) (11/06/89)

In article <2617@brazos.Rice.edu> amc-vlsi!ryan@beaver.cs.washington.edu writes:
>X-Sun-Spots-Digest: Volume 8, Issue 179, message 4 of 14
>
>I've never been able to force SunOS 3.5 to recognize a swap entry in the
>fstab.  The quick and dirty fix would be to add a line in /etc/rc.local to
>start swapping on the extra disk:
>
>    /usr/etc/swapon /dev/sd2b                   > /dev/console

The trick is that the /etc/fstab entry must have all fields filled in,
even if they are meaningless.  So a typical fstab entry is

	/dev/sd1b swap swap 0 0 0

Then the normal swapon -a in /etc/rc will work, assuming you config'd your
kernel for it.  And remember, no blank lines in fstab.

BTW, I noticed a very large improvement in the total disk throughput on a
SCSI based system using 2 swap partitions.  iostat said I was swapping on
a 3/60 at a max of 440 k/s, instead of about 250 for a single disk.  If
you have any Lisp users on your system, you should consider it anyway.  Or
Gnu Emacs (Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping :-).

Mike.