Linux 5.7 Will Let You Setup A Swap File Over A Network With SMB3/Samba

[Dark-Show]

The year is 2035, computers now ship with 8MB of ram with the possibility of renting case dependant ram over our 10G LTE connections.

/Sarcasm

New features are great!
Can't wait to see how these features advance with increasing local/remote bandwidth.

[CommunityMember]

Why not swap over VHS tapes? I have a big drawer full of those and I'd like to make some use of them again.

Few probably remember, but DECTape was, indeed, random access, and could be used for swap as needed (it made early multiuser timesharing practical on those limited systems).

[ssokolow]

Why can't we swap over telegraph line yet ? When is that to come ?

Probably after they implement swap over RFC 2549-compliant connections.

[cb88]

Few probably remember, but DECTape was, indeed, random access, and could be used for swap as needed (it made early multiuser timesharing practical on those limited systems).

There is a big difference between random access and random seek... hard disk seeks are on the order of 100ms or less (tens ms or so on modern drives) while on a tape you could be talking up to 30 seconds for a seek.

It take 100-150ms just for a DECTape just to start up and slow down...

[torsionbar28]

Why not swap over VHS tapes? I have a big drawer full of those and I'd like to make some use of them again.

Why on earth would you do that?? We should use the VHS tapes as primary memory instead. DDR4 is sooo overrated.

[skeevy420]

All this joke discussion of old stuff is getting me nostalgic and I wish these would make a comeback in the form of a mini rw bluray.

I held onto that format for as long as I was able. Eventually my player made grindy noises and between mp3 capable cd players being common and MDs becoming expensive and hard-to-find I've been sitting here wishing they'd make an upgraded comeback with every disk standard upgrade since.

[Brane215]

Why on earth would you do that?? We should use the VHS tapes as primary memory instead. DDR4 is sooo overrated.

Joking aside, old VHS mechanic could performa admirably as a redneck LTO, if paired with modern modulations.

[Etherman]

This makes sense being that Linux supports multi-level paging and setting priorities on each level.

Setting a tiered page set on a 800Gbs Ethernet or a future Terabit+ backbone to some large fault tolerant flash array.

The only concern would be where the CPU is significantly tasked, NFS and SMB tend to delay their responses to status which could break the page and cause a fault.

I think network block device would be an better option.
Years ago I set up a thin client of an pentium 3 with 32MB ram and no harddrive.
It used ethernet for booting, NFS for filesystem and NBD for swap device.

[Hans Bull]

So it would be technically possible to create swapfiles on smb-shared ramdisks? Exciting!

[cynic]

That's what swap files are for.

no. Swap files are made for swap.

hibernation is just ONE of the possible uses for swapfiles.
you may want to use a swap file on a SSD just for swap but don't want to allocate a big swap file for occasional hibernation.