On Oct 16, 11:10am, pwain@nc.com wrote:
> Subject: Swapping to file and printers too...
> Hi all,
>
> Two completely unrelated questions...
>
> 1) I need to do a link which needs around 100Mb+ of memory to even think
about
> starting
> from what I can tell. The question therefore arrises of how to swap to a
file.
> I guessed
> swapon(8) (well not so much a guess but...) but this doesnt work:
>
> 	# swapon /disk1/swapfile
> 	swapon: /disk1/swapfile: Block device required
>
> (I did play around with mknod too, but all the variants I tried came back
with
>  device not configured). Any ideas?

All the swap devices for NetBSD currently have to be configured at kernel
compile time so if you want to add an additional swap device you have to
recompile the kernel. Once the device is configured you can switch it on with
swapon. To start swapping to a file you have to turn the file into a vnode
device, configure the vnode device as swap in your kernel and finally use
swapon to enable it. Matthew Green and myself are working on a run-time
configuration scheme but it isn't ready yet.

Cheers

Rob

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