SUMMARY: puzzling behavior during Solaris 2.6 install

Judith Reed (jreed@wukon.appliedtheory.com)
Wed, 21 Jan 1998 08:17:36 -0500

Thanks to all who replied to my question about our inability to get a
Solaris 2.6 system to use all of a 4GB partition for swap, when configured as:

> Part Tag Flag Cylinders Size Blocks
> 0 swap wu 0 - 3879 4.00GB (3880/0/0) 8380800

The consensus is that while Solaris supports filesystems up to 1 terabyte,
swap will not use more than 2GB per swap space.

Some of the responses are below:
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from david@xtend.net
* I have had problems including cylinder 0 as part of a slice to be used
for swap; my understanding at the time was that swap activity would
trash what otherwise would be the disk labels.

----->> This sounded like a good hunch, so we tried starting from cylinder
10, didn't make any difference.
---------------------------------------------------
from dunn@sled.gsfc.nasa.gov
See:
http://www.sun.com/sunworldonline/swol-04-1996/swol-04-perf.html
The article refers to Solaris pre-2.6 but I believe that swap is not large
file aware. There is a limit of 2GB to the size of a swap partition. You
can add as many swap partitions as you like; there is no limit to the
total size of swap in Solaris 2.
-----------------------------------------------------
from steve.butterfield@pcs.co.uk
This is one of the places where Solaris is still 32 bit
The only way to do this is to create 2 x 2GB swap partitions
-----------------------------------------------------
from casper@holland.Sun.COM
You need to split the disk in two; Solaris 2.6 only supports upto 2GB
sized swap partitions. (The extra you see for /tmp is from the physical
memory that also counts as swap)
-----------------------------------------------------

-- 
Judith Reed
jreed@appliedtheory.com