On Sat, Feb 15, 2003 at 10:55:34PM -0800, Bryan Vyhmeister wrote:
> On Saturday, February 15, 2003, at 08:15 AM, Miles Nordin wrote:
> 
> >>>>>> "krm" == Kenneth R Mort <ken@post3.mort.net> writes:
> > NO SWAP ON CF!

even with a fairly active swap partition, the wear leveling on CF disks
ought to keep wear from being a real problem for most purposes.
if netbsd has a decent VM subsystem (and I'm assuming it does), it shouldn't
swap much anyway.

> Are you saying it isn't good to have swap at all? Are there any 
> problems with running without any swap?

the main issue with swap on CF, is that CF memory *does* wear out eventually
(1M cycles comes to mind). this will probably take a surprisingly long time
to accomplish tho, on an OS which doesn't swap unless it *really* needs to.
if you hammer on your swap partition hard enough to wear it out in a short
period of time; I would suggest that you are dealing with problems larger
than your system will readily handle, and you ought to get a small laptop
with more memory and a spinning disk (I'm reasonably happy with my Dell
X200).

it's been hammered over before on the list, and I think the upshot was that
you shouldn't worry about it.

I ran without swap on my 48MB z50, and it ran just fine. (then again, I
never bothered with X; but just using it as an Xterm, it shouldn't be much
of an issue). There's an option in the rc.conf file I believe, where you can
set SWAP=no, so it won't complain about the lack of swap on your system.

speaking of which, I'm considering selling my z50. my Dell X200 is barely
larger, and much more functional. I've got 48MB RAM, 128MB CF, linksys NE2K
NIC (works under wince too), plus the extened capacity battery and the
flashlight-battery pack as well. It's been sitting here unused, and maybe
someone else will make good use of it.

Carl Soderstrom.
-- 
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com