Disabling swapping on PS2 AIX 1.1 (how?)

[Jack F. Vogel]

In article <1990Mar23.021257.13155 at cs.columbia.edu> ji at cs.columbia.edu (John Ioannidis) writes:
>I'm trying to configure an PS/2 AIX 1.1 kernel so that it doesn't
>swap.  With 16M in my machines, I don't see a reason why I should
>bother with swapping (why, the default swap space size is something
>like 4MB!!!).  However, the kernel insists on allocating swap space on
>the swap device even though it's never going to *need* it. 
>
>Has anyone done this before? How hard is it? If I don't have any swap
>partitions on my disk, the kernel panics with the insulting message
>"can't add a paging device".
 
NO,NO,NO!!!! The panic message that you quote above should have given you
a clue as to your mistake. The swap device is also a PAGING device and the
kernel IS going to *need* that!! Even with 16Meg it isn't hard to require
some paging or swapping for that matter, why you might run X or GNU emacs
:-} :-}! Also, I find it odd that you find an informative panic message
to be "insulting"?!?

4MB is an awfully small price to pay for a working system :-}. In fact, if
you do configure your system with only this much swap area and start to
use a lot of core with, say, 10 X clients plus whatever number of other
processes and you do need to swap more than you have room for, processes
will just arbitrarily start to be killed. I've seen this problem on some
of our systems at LCC with many users and inadequate swap space and believe
me it is quite annoying! With the size of disks these days I would set up
the PS/2 to have 16MB of swap.

Disclaimer: These opinions are mine, although LCC doesn't pay me for my
	    good looks :-}.

-- 
Jack F. Vogel			jackv at seas.ucla.edu
AIX Technical Support	              - or -
Locus Computing Corp.		jackv at ifs.umich.edu