Swap on ZFS

[Daniel Staal]

--As of May 6, 2014 11:37:55 PM -0500, Andrew Berg is alleged to have said:

> On 2014.05.06 23:20, Rolf Nielsen wrote:
>> If I want to talk to my mother, I call my mother and talk to her. I
>> don't call my sister and have her call my mother and relay everything.
>> And for the same reason, I don't see why I should put a filesystem or
>> swap on a volume on a filesystem.
> By that logic, you should talk to her in person and not relay your voice
> over the phone.
>
> zvols are far more flexible than partitions and have the added benefit
> of COW (cheap snapshots and clones anyone?) and checksums
> underneath. Instantly getting more space in your zpool by cutting
> down unneeded swap would be quite nice.

--As for the rest, it is mine.

ZFS also adds resiliency, in most use cases.  Yes, you can set up normal 
swap to use redundant disks, but I'm not sure how off the top of my head, 
while it's one of the base features of ZFS.  I don't know what happens when 
a swap disk fails in use, but I suspect it isn't pretty.  With ZFS you may 
not even have to shut the machine down to replace the disk.

(And of course you can go the *other* way: Add swap for a particular 
situation, if needed.  Even just for running a single job.)

Daniel T. Staal

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