From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Apr 5 04:05:16 1995 Return-Path: hackers-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id EAA15796 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 5 Apr 1995 04:05:16 -0700 Received: from godzilla.zeta.org.au (godzilla.zeta.org.au [203.2.228.34]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id EAA15782 for ; Wed, 5 Apr 1995 04:04:57 -0700 Received: (from bde@localhost) by godzilla.zeta.org.au (8.6.9/8.6.9) id UAA16461; Wed, 5 Apr 1995 20:52:05 +1000 Date: Wed, 5 Apr 1995 20:52:05 +1000 From: Bruce Evans Message-Id: <199504051052.UAA16461@godzilla.zeta.org.au> To: davidg@Root.COM, luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it Subject: Re: swap always use at least 64KB ? Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Sender: hackers-owner@FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk >>which is kind of curious, as the machine has 16 MB ram and almost >>no activity going on... Swap partition, when in use, are always >>reported with at least 64 KB in use. >> >>Is there any explaination ? > The first swap block is always pre-allocated. This was done to work around >a problem with people putting their swap partition at the beginning of their >disk (the system would happily try to destroy the label). I suppose it would >be better to change swapinfo/pstat to not include the first block of swap >space in its report. There must be bugs in the write protection of the label for that to happen. The diskslice "driver" snoops on writes to label sector(s) and rejects writing of invalid labels even when write protection is off. Similar snooping is required for protecting the MBR and secondary BR's. Bruce