Re: dump memory footprint

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I have a problem with dump memeory footprint. I would like to dump a
> filesystem containing 34 kB, and dump will not do it unless I setup
> around 10 MB of swap:

If the filesystem is large (even if not much of it is currently used),
this makes sense - dump needs to read the inodes.

In principle, it's possible to do this piecemeal.  It's difficult
enough that (apparently) nobody's done it; I'm sure there are people
who'd appreciate it if you were to fix it.  (Be careful, though; dump
is already full enough of race conditions when dumping live filesystems
and it would probably be a bad thing to make them worse.)

If the filesystem itself is tiny, I would say this is a bug somewhere,
probably in dump.

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