[Cryptography] swap needed, or not
John Denker
jsd at av8n.com
Wed Apr 23 15:41:27 EDT 2014
On 04/22/2014 12:55 PM, Tom Mitchell wrote
> Swap is still needed, the size is open to discussion.
>
> The reason is the fork(); exec() pair.
Swap is not generally needed, not for that reason or
any other.
Proof by construction: There are LOTS of embedded
systems that run just fine with no swap. Been there,
done that.
Additional proof by construction: This email is being
composed on a laptop with no swap. Bog-standard Ubuntu
Linux. Bog-standard x86_64 hardware.
You can always create situations where swap is needed:
-- Maybe you want to run big programs in a small amount
of physical memory.
-- Maybe you want your laptop to hibernate.
However ... there remain LOTS of practical situations
where swap is not needed.
On 04/23/2014 09:31 AM, Peter Gutmann wrote:
>> That's obviously a Unix-specific thing, because Windows will run with zero
>> swap quite happily.
It's not a Unix-specific thing. It's not any kind of
thing at all. Unix runs with zero swap quite happily.
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