David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)I just remembered a time we ran out of memory on a very slow machine that had no hard disk and discovered that you could use a file on NFS as a swap device (it worked, and we were able to complete the thing we needed to do, but it was very slow), but now I’m wondering if anyone is doing swap over iSCSI.
Michael Engel@david_chisnall Our diskless SPARC ELC workstations swapped to an NFS by default. Our old SCSI disks weren't that much faster than the (lightly loaded 10Base2) 10 Mbps Ethernet, so that worked amazingly well...
@me_ Hah, the one I did this with was a SPARC as well.
My NAS has an iSCSI disk mounted from a server in Canada via Wireguard and it isn’t much slower than local spinning rust (often faster for random reads, since the remote machine has a big RAM cache), which is what made me wonder if this is actually a sensible thing for small machines. I can easily imagine setting up iSCSI swap devices for RPis for example.
@david_chisnall People already use remote RAM accessed via RDMA over Infiniband or CXL fabrics, so iSCSI over a relatively high bandwidth and low-latency transport sounds reasonable. Definitely better than swapping to an SD card on a Raspberry Pi 😀.