Re: ext3 or xfs for desktop laptop

* David R. Litwin <presently42@xxxxxxxxx> [2006 Jun 10 17:10 -0500]:

A swap *file* does the same thing a swap *partition* does.

Amazing, no?

I understand that part. I do not understand why one would be better than an other. Nor
have you indicated what guidelines I can use for determining an appropriate
size.

As a rule of thumb, the minimum size should match your installed RAM.
Going larger will not hurt. If you have acres of drive space available,
make it double your installed/planned RAM size.

I've always used swap partitions. Last year I had a laptop crash in the
swap partition. As a result I was able to recover all of my data. It's
always possible that the crash could have occured anywhere on the disk.
In this case it was a simple matter to boot KNOPPIX with the noswap
option and then mount my partitions read-only and rsync them over to the
desktop to recover them. My theory is that on a heavily loaded system
the heads will be in the swap partition and the data area will be less
likely to be affected by a head crash.

> As an aside, Mr. Johnson noted that hyperthreading can slow my
> computer down. In relation to the research that I did when I was
> wondering which kernel to use (a long time ago), I found out that
> hyper threading simply tells the processor to use it's free time
> to execute more activities. I failed to see (and still do) how
> this can slow my computer down.

Read more.

tells the processor to use it's free time to execute more
activities

That's what *every* multi-tasking OS has done for the past 30 years.

HT makes the CPU look, to the OS, look like 2 CPUs. Good in some
circumstances, bad in most.

This is of particular interest to me. In what ways is HT "bad is most [ways]"?
This begs some objective test data, not opinion. HT is being touted as
a feature of high end Intel based workstations. If its performance is
detrimental to Linux, then I expect the kernel and glibc developers to
either be addressing the problems or working around them. I'll admit to
not following LKM closely, but I've not read anything in Linux Journal nor
elsewhere (including this fine list) that those of us running Linux
should avoid HT technology.

I have been considering an HT based machine and would like to learn of
any potential pitfalls.

- Nate >>

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