4zv4l
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.
Ignas Kiela@david_chisnall I'd hope they're moving over to NVMe over TCP these days
LisPiI heard of it for the first time yesterday. This morning, there was a security advisory for the FreeBSD implementation. This is why I should not learn new things.
@david_chisnall @[email protected] Incredible vulnerability, having a null pointer dereference when logging message warning that the parameters given are invalid and it can't find the thing that it then subsequently dereferences
Matthew Skelton@david_chisnall omg, that brings back memories! 🤓
JW@david_chisnall
In my past one particular sales rep, to keep the price down, always under specked the memory. He never understood why I bought dearer bids with much more memory.
In my past one particular sales rep, to keep the price down, always under specked the memory. He never understood why I bought dearer bids with much more memory.
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 😀.
mxey@david_chisnall we run VMs with their whole disk over iSCSI, so that includes swap.
Having a separate local disk for swap would really complicate live migrations.
Having a separate local disk for swap would really complicate live migrations.
Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd@david_chisnall Me! Used it to give some extra boost on a Pi when I was doing a local build of Compiler Explorer
Sun Microdevil Pte Ltd (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image iSCSI-based CloudSwap™ is ready :02smile:
@david_chisnall 100% would do it again if I'm working with lowmem or olden devices (but probs backed by a ramdisk instead of real ones; think of "borrowing" some memory haha)
Beats having to wear out flash or dealing with slow drives/ports