Date: Wed, 20 Mar 1996 08:44:44 +0100 (MET) From: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> To: wes@intele.net Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Diskless FreeBSD Message-ID: <199603200744.IAA04324@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> In-Reply-To: <199603200640.XAA06473@obie.softweyr.com> from "wes@intele.net" at Mar 19, 96 11:39:59 pm
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> > I am asking because I plan to support diskless for our lab (50+ > > systems, but very few of them are expected to be in use simultaneously), > > and preallocating some 20MB of swap for each machine seems unnecessary > > expensive. > > Do yourself a favor and figure out some way to put a small swap disk > into your 'diskless' workstations. Even Sun eventually figured out > that 'dataless' workstations worked *much* better than 'diskless.' > I.e. the system has a local boot, root, and swap device, and NFS > mounts all 'user' directories. While I can agree for local swap, it turns out that diskless boot is, on many systems, as fast as or even faster than BIOS boot. Not to mention the fact that having a FS on a workstation will require you to do some mainteinance on it sooner or later. Also, my point is that there are several of our systems which are used symply as unattended informtations terminals, running X and some WWW browser. These system have a very stripped down configuration: 8MB ram, no floppy, no hd, --> no mainteintance :) > It is necessary, because the swap code always expects to get the disk > sectors when it asks for them. An allocation failure in swap is a > pretty heart-rending (well, system-rending) experience. Couldn't it be dealt with as an "out of swap" condition ? After all, such an allocation failure is only going to occur when the FS fills up, which is not my case -- the crashes that people reported because the swap was not preallocated were not caused by a disk full on the server. Luigi ==================================================================== Luigi Rizzo Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione email: luigi@iet.unipi.it Universita' di Pisa tel: +39-50-568533 via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy) fax: +39-50-568522 http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/ ====================================================================
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