Swap Brainstorm (was Re: [Rule-list] Test of 0.6.3-small - the whole story)

[Chuck Moss]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2002 at 09:53:55AM -0700, Scott Hallock wrote:
> [most of the message from Devon has been elided, I just left a couple
> of relavant quotes.]
> > All normal (the delays) when you have stretched the memory limits of the 
> > installer. The message above is the amount of swap  that the 
> > autopartition utility would suggest, and is also normal.
> .
> .
> .
> > 
> > Yes, once we can get swap turned on, things go pretty well.
> 
> I've been pondering the problem of having to do so much initial work
> without swap for, well, a few years now.  It seems like we would
> have much better luck installing in extremely low memory situations
> if we could find and activate some swap very early in the boot
> process.
> 
> Suppose a user could arrange for MBR partition 0 of the first BIOS drive
> to be set up as a reasonably-sized partition with a Linux swap partition 
> identifier before attempting to boot the installer.[1]  Would it be 
> possible to modifiy the installer init scripts to run a program or programs 
> that identify this situation, and immediately run mkswap and swapon on the 
> pre-made swap partition?  Would doing so help the install process at all, 
> or is the size of the initrd what's killing us?
> 
> Forgive me if these questions sound stupid.  I know next to nothing
> about how Red Hat installs itself these days.  Writing the program
> to identify a pre-made swap partition is probably not beyond my
> abilities, but I have no idea if I could insert it into the Red Hat
> installation process.

One problem I can see with this,   If you do this automatically 
in the installer you might have trouble re-partitioning the disk later in
the install if you were already using the swap.  For a stock redhat install
it makes sense to utilize the swap after you partition.
For our purposes it could be a "super expert" mode of the stock installer.
(always dwelling on the fact that we eventually want to roll our changes
into the stock installer)

Chuck

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