Subject: Re: VM in NetBSD
To: None <current-users@sun-lamp.cs.berkeley.edu>
From: Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com>
List: current-users
Date: 02/07/1994 12:01:00
According to the manual page of the vnconfig command, it should
allow you to start swapping on a file, by hooking this file up to
a special vn-device. I haven't actually tried this (has someone?),
but it looks like an option for additional swapspace at runtime.
I would also like to be able to add partitions with swapon at runtime
when I have not configured them into the kernel. This hasn't worked
for me, and I don't see a reason why it couldn't.
Removing partitions at runtime is obviously a stickier issue. As I
understand it, netbsd sprinkles pages evenly across all the active
swap partitions. This makes it difficult to remove partitions; the
kernel would need some special swap-reassigning code. I presume that
to allow removal of active swap areas, Linux just allocates linearly
so that later space you haven't consumed yet is always removable.
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