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jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

I’m not advocating for anything but for distros to stop recommending swap partitions. I advocate for right-sizing your hardware to predicable workloads and not using swap at all. On your pet servers or desktops where the workload is experimental or wildly unpredictable, swap files make more sense over partitions.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

This is a mechanism post not a policy post. If you want to see my take on swap, see my last response on that gift.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

Swap is not recommended on servers where responsiveness and determinism are more important than failure recovery of any one server.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

I love this kind of stuff. Great share

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

Looks like this was added in util-linux 2.40. Works with btrfs correctly too! Added.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

This recommendation is based off the current implementation.

See:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/827751b699b79a6e56998...

The thread is quoted to show that they have been functionally equivalent for several decades and yet distros continue to push outdated recommendations.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

+1. This test and its conclusions are flawed. See CAV/CLV

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

you love to see it

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

What subsystem are you referring to?

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

I wrote this years ago before LLMs made it easy to validate guesswork. I’ll update! Good call

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

Ah the old HN hug. I’ll fix it

jenderson An interactive tour of the spanning tree protocol

Fantastic

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

>> ZFS is overrated and mostly a hobbyist/enthusiast thing.

Not true at all.. but most large object storage redundancy has moved to the application layer. There are still workloads that are a great fit but I agree OpenZFS is currently not well suited as a general purpose FS.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

Not a btrfs user but OpenZFS u til recently didn’t even support O_DIRECT and may still duplicate page cache in arc. It’s not well suited as a general purpose FS where you can’t anticipate the workload, like on a desktop.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

Agreed. Buy more RAM but these days that means taking a HELOC

jenderson Stop making swap partitions–use swap files instead

Truth be told—- I don’t use swap and set `vm.swappiness=0` but in these difficult times, swap may be the hero we need.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions–use swap files instead

That’s a good call out. I’ve never used ZFS on root. Been a ZFS user on Linux since the FUSE days but it has never seemed particular well suited (O_DIRECT support came late, ARC/page cache redundancy, etc). I can’t guarantee a consistent enough workload to optimize ZFS for and I don’t feel like it’s general purpose enough. Large object storage though? I’m sitting on a PB of ZFS.

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

How often are you needing to change partition geometry after install, on a server?

jenderson Stop making swap partitions—use swap files instead

If you want to share step-by-step, I’ll update the gist.

jenderson AlphaGenome Atlas predictive map of every DNA letter change in the human genome

If you like that abstract geometric headline image, you might also like the source artist their model “learned” it from: https://leegriggs.com/xgen-rendered-with-arnold-for-maya

jenderson Tmp.0ut Volume 5

Agreed. Love stuff like this. Keep it comin’

jenderson HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python

Context: spent my career building CDNs at Cloudflare/facebook/pinterest.

The h3 juice is worth the squeeze. 0rtt TLS, BBR, HPACK, etc. You can roughly achieve this with a carefully configured h2 deployment across multiple layers and packages or just move to h3 and let the app layer handle it all. We baked all of the best practices into h3, the world just needs to move on.

jenderson HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python

Seems like the major gripe is over my usage of the word “obsolete” instead of “deprecated”. We could all be flipping switches instead of tapping on MacBooks but you gotta draw a line somewhere.

jenderson HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python

Agreed! I love naming things :D

jenderson HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python

Yep. All HTTP/2 features are subsumed by HTTP/3 and all HTTP/2 deployments should be focusing their effort on moving to HTTP/3.

HTTP/2 is full of growing pains and fiddly kernel config for it to perform better than even HTTP/1.1.

Moving these dependencies into userland was the path that HTTP/3 took and it has proven itself through CDN and browser adoption for years now.

I’d go as far as to say that we need to reevaluate the event loops in nginx and elsewhere to assume UDP and HTTP/3 framing instead of TCP. There are gains to be had.

jenderson HTTPX2 – A next-generation HTTP client for Python

I would been pleased to see this project named something else, maybe “httpx-ng” or “httpy” as I immediately link “http*2” with the obsolete http/2 protocol and not the httpx project.

jenderson Meta enables ADB on deprecated Portal devices [video]

boz is the CTO

jenderson Meta enables ADB on deprecated Portal devices [video]

I’m very interested to see if this develops until a full bootloader unlock. Picked up CIB hardware on eBay for $70. A general purpose Linux kiosk for this price is a no brainer.

jenderson Meta enables adb on deprecated Portal devices

wfm without a meta account but here is the direct link: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1561665975384013

jenderson Palestinians warn of expanding West Bank settler violence

Sadly, it’s the least surprising thing these days. HN is yet another target for the propaganda bots on both sides. It wasn’t always like this.