Re: [iPAQ] Wish List

Carl Worth wrote:
>
> 2) Since I keep running out of memory during big compiles I've
> tried to add some swap space. The swapon man pages say,
> "Swap over NFS may not work" and I'm beginning to agree
> there. If I do the mkswap from the iPAQ I always get
> "invalid swap file" from swapon. If I run mkswap from my
> NFS server, then the swapon succeeds, but I get periodic
> messages saying something like "rw_swap: invalid swap
> file", (can't remember the exact message) and processes
> start dying. Any hints from the skiffcluster maintainers
> about how I can get this to work?

I've successfully used the nbd device to get network swap devices
working on low-memory diskless boot boxen before. This is with
Linux/i386 though, and I don't know if the nbd drivers work on the iPAQ
Linux port. Also, the very scarce documentation I've ever been able to
dig up say that swap-over-nbd isn't supposed to actually work, although
it's worked ok for me in practice, and in exactly the kinds of
situations you're describing: compiling large applications that need
more than the physical memory to compile.

I've also seen some reference not-too-long-ago from someone who was
working on some kind of "nbd mark 2" driver which was supposed to be
"nbd done 'correctly'", I assume that would mean it should correctly
handle stuff like swap and network latency and deal with nbd servers
that have gone away and all that, but I don't remember where I saw it...

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