fstab type "dp"

[Gavin Atkinson]

On Wed, 2009-01-14 at 03:20 +0100, Max Laier wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 January 2009 02:10:55 Jeremie Le Hen wrote:
> > Dear Kostik,
> >
> > On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 11:23:55PM +0200, Kostik Belousov wrote:
> > > What are the supposed advantages of this approach over the dumpdev
> > > variable in rc.conf ? I see that having whole partition usage
> > > configuration in fstab is natural, so the idea of the patch is
> > > probably right.
> >
> > This is exactly the point.  fstab(5) will describe every partition
> > usage.
> >
> > >                 One the other hand, is it possible to enchance
> > > this to allow specification of the swap partition that is also
> > > a dump partition, in fstab ?
> >
> > Well, actually I think it makes more sense to automatically add "dp"
> > device as swap.  You will find an updated patch attached where swapon(8)
> > has been modified to implement this behaviour.  Is it better now?
> 
> I don't agree here.  The point of having a dedicated dump device could be to 
> not overwrite the state of the swap when dumping core.  In addition, a dump 
> device could double as a place for suspend to disk if/when we implement this - 
> in this scenario it would also be required that the dump device does not hold 
> valuable swap data.

I second this:  I have some machines which are SCSI throughout, but have
a single slow IDE disk reserved as a dump device (as dump isn't happy
with the SCSI controller).  I wouldn't want it to be treated
automatically as a swap device though, as the IDE disk is significantly
slower, and not mirrored.

Gavin