Re: adding swap when expanding root filesystem

On Tue, Nov 8, 2022 at 12:10 AM Mike Karels <mike@karels.net> wrote:

> This question is not really arm-specific, but I couldn't think of a better
> mailing list for it.
>
> There are peridic issues reported on small systems like Raspberry Pi
> where people are running buildworld or poudriere and running out of
> memory.  As the user gets no control over the disk layout when installing,
> there is no option to add swap space on the install image.  I have added
> swap space on a USB disk, but this is often not an option.  It occurred
> to me that it might be reasonable to add swap space before expanding
> the root filesystem if there is sufficient space.  I have a prototype,
> and wondered if this is a good thing to do.  Granted, this will often
> create swap on microSD, which is not optimal, but probably better than
> nothing.
>
> The current prototype creates a swap partition which is 1/10 of the disk
> if the disk is at least 15 GB and the initial root partition is no more
> than 1/3 of the disk, but only up to 1.5x of physical memory.  I would
> probably enable this by default, but provide a way to disable it via a
> kenv variable and/or a variable in /etc/rc.conf.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>                 Mike
>

Hi Mike,

That's a pleasant to have as my current scenario belongs to this concern
using RPi 3B/4B as build machines.

Thanks and best regards,
Archimedes