<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;">In Feb 2013 I built the raspbian kernel on the original Raspi (512MB). Took about 10 hours. Don't recall if any swap was used but likely. Not sure how different was the raspbian kernel at that time compared to the stock linux kernel (if there is such a thing). I never wanted to repeat the build though!<div><br></div><div>In contrast the plan9 kernel build took a minute.<br><div><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On Feb 28, 2025, at 8:42 AM, Tom Lyon <pugs78@gmail.com> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="ltr">The counterpoint to "just say no to swapping" is that sometimes you really, really, want a job to proceed even if at a glacial pace.<div><br></div><div>Some years ago I had to do a Linux kernel build on a 1GB(maybe less?) MIPS system, and even though it had oodles of swap space, the OOM killer kept biting.</div><div>Turns out you have to tune "swappiness" in poorly documented ways to get Linux to actually use virtual memory. I think the build took about a week once it worked.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote gmail_quote_container"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Feb 28, 2025 at 8:04 AM Dennis Boone <<a href="mailto:drb@msu.edu">drb@msu.edu</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"> > I’m probably a lost soul on this issue, but swap space is just a way<br>
> to turn program bugs into performance problems.<br>
<br>
You're hardly the only one. Some years ago, running Linux web and<br>
database servers, I quit creating swap space. A runaway program would<br>
turn the system into an infinite game of shuffle-the-pages well before<br>
the OOM killer actually decided to kill something, and in that state,<br>
one couldn't even reboot. This expanded the time window of "broken"<br>
from tens of seconds, and perhaps a service restart, into tens of<br>
minutes and a power button recovery. Every #$%^&* time.<br>
<br>
De<br>
</blockquote></div>
</div></blockquote></div><br></div></div></body></html>