In article <199710041605.SAA16043@orade.ora.de>,
   	Christoph Badura <bad@ora.de> writes:
   > Partition b isn't magically reserved for swap.
   
   But you must be careful if you use it for something but swap space. If you
   e.g. don't list any swap partitions in "/etc/fstab" and it's on the boot
   harddisk "swapctl" will AFAIK automatically use it.


this is incorrect.  the only magic thing about the b partition is that
the system will use it as a place to dump a kernel core to if the a
partition of the disk is the root file system.  this is suboptimal, yes.


swapctl will never enable swap on any partition that is not explicitly
listed in /etc/fstab, or on the command line.