FW: [techtalk] Installing Linux on a second hard drive.

[Andy Davidoff]

You are correct, of course, my fault. :-)
This is apparently distribution-specific.

See 'priority' in the swapon([28]) pages:

       Swap  pages  are  allocated  from areas in priority order,
       highest priority first.  For areas with different  priori-
       ties,  a  higher-priority area is exhausted before using a
       lower-priority area.  If two or more areas have  the  same
       priority,  and it is the highest priority available, pages
       are allocated on a round-robin basis between them.

Here's a demonstration of round-robin (striped versus concatenated) swap:

$ cat /proc/swaps
Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda4                       partition       546200  816     1
/dev/sdb4                       partition       546200  808     1


#if Kelly Lynn Martin /* Apr 18, 14:38 */
> On Tue, 18 Apr 2000 00:59:27 -0400, Andy Davidoff <dert at pobox.com> said:
> >Under Linux, multiple swap partitions are automagically striped,
> 
> This is not true, at least not under 2.2.12:
> [kelly at poverty ca]$ cat /proc/swaps 
> Filename                        Type            Size    Used    Priority
> /dev/hda4                       partition       189496  95732   -1
> /dev/hdc5                       partition       25952   0       -2
#endif /* kelly */

-- 
Andy Davidoff
Sen. Unix SA, EECS
Tufts University