[kwlug-disc] HDD Partition & swap space

[John Johnson]

On 2014-07-30 14:07, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote: (in another thread)
> Side note: one of my main gripes ...
>
> ... when it comes to hard disks, they can be partitioned space wise ...
Using the above as both a gripe and question: In the old days (w/Unix & 
with smaller HDDs) I used to partition a hard disk such that a partition 
was reserved exclusively for a swap space. The partition was mapped 
accordingly, i.e. to the swap space in the OS.

The idea was to isolate the swap space from application data which could 
grow over time. This avoided a potential system failure if the 
application data grows to a point where the OS is impacted by the lack 
of swap space.

This worked well even if there was only one physical HDD.

It has been a long time (decades) since I set up systems this way.

Is this still possible / recommended / practiced with Linux?

I looked for the ability to the same in the other popular OS and could 
not find a way to map the swap space to a separate partition.

OT (on my own post): While working on some custom code on another 
consultant's installation, I was running into HDD filesystem errors that 
presented problems to my work. And fsck would not run because there was 
only one HDD and fsck wanted a separate swap space.

sysadm was not my responsibility, nor did I want that responsibility.

I traveled to the site with a blank 1.2 Mbyte floppy which I temporarily 
mounted as a volume for use by fsck. When the fsck was done I dismounted 
the volume and packed my 'magic disk' away. I could then work on my code 
changes.

JohnJ