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Date:      Tue, 8 Oct 1996 21:15:22 +0100 (MET)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        wollman@lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Cc:        henrich@crh.cl.msu.edu, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: 961006-SNAP comments
Message-ID:  <199610082015.VAA01431@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <9610081802.AA20747@halloran-eldar.lcs.mit.edu> from "Garrett Wollman" at Oct 8, 96 02:01:46 pm

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> > Finally, a note on the computation of "default" partitions. It looks like
> > computations are based on memory size rather than on disk space. I have
...
> When I first wrote the code to do that, it just automatically took
> twice the size of physical memory.  Different people have different
> needs for swap, so it's difficult to make a choice that will please
> both people with 8M machines and those with 64M machines.  (I have 40M

It was a very good choice back in the days when affordable disks were
around 200MB and were almost completely taken by the OS+user files, so
saving disk space was important. But now disks have grown 8-10 times in
capacity, and we weren't as good as other to make newer releases of the
os take up all the available space. So, dedicating a small
fraction of the slice or 2xRAM, whatever is larger, to swap
space as a default should go unnoticed by people with large disks, and
they will have less risks of running out of swap.

I can only speak for myself, but quite often I do installations on
a small dedicated system to avoid troubles, and then move the disk
to its final place (almost all of our systems use IDE disks mounted
on a removable frame; probably more convenient than a laptop, for
home<-->office use).

	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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