Re: your mail

[is%beverly.rhein.de@localhost (Ignatios Souvatzis)]

Hi Per,

> 
>     Some beginners questions:
> 
> I am planning on installing NetBSD on my Amiga. Its '060 acellerated and with
> plenty of RAM.
> 
> 1.  Does the swap partition  a l w a y s  need "2M for every M ram" ?

No. That's just a rule of thumb for small systems.

Furthermore, it was developed at the time of the old BSD VM system, which 
used RAM only as cache for the swap space + program text areas. The real
restriction then was that swap must be > RAM, else the RAM could't be used.

The new VM system uses RAM as cache for program text, but can held
anonymous data in RAM without allocating swap space... you only need
swap space if you have really huge data. Well, and you can't get kernel
crash dumps (if you're interested in kernel debugging) without a swap area.

On small systems (e.g., my A3000 with originally 8, later 12, later 16
megs) I use about 50 MB of swap. It's too much most of the time, but is
needed if you use a lot of X11 applications.

On my big system I used about 60 MB of swap for (currently) 40 MB of
RAM. . 

Note that you should make your swap bigger if you plan to use a "mfs"
for the /tmp. 

        -is
        Ignatios Souvatzis