Re: Installers, fstab and swap.
On 04/13/2011 01:45 AM, Paul Wise wrote:
Neither option is without negative consequences.
If you format the swap then the other distros on the machine that use
UUIDs to find their swap partitions will lose them.
Yes, I personally find this behavior unacceptable to leave
alone without at least informing the user this is the case.
If you don't format the swap then you are sharing the swap partition
with the other distros on the machine. This is likely to cause data
loss if one distribution is hibernated and the user starts another
distro.
This seems to be a documentation issue. Frankly I never thought
about this and trying to research through documentation and Google, I
never found anything that pointed this out to me. I thank you very much
for such a useful response.
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch06s03.html.en#di-partition
http://wiki.debian.org/Swap
Neither of these seem to inform the user of their options in the
matter of Swap, spelling out the pros and cons of the different ways it
can be setup.
I think the only proper solution is to create a new swap partition for
each distro installed. You could also ask the user if they prefer data
loss or killing the swap on their other installed distros.
It seems to me the best solution is to inform the user of their
options and act accordingly. Having multiple swap partitions would be a
waste on most peoples machines. I have shared Swap between distros for
years without incident, but I was never aware I was flirting with
disaster. Even now I am not going to change because "On" and "Off" are
the only states I care my machine to be in :)
Formatting the swap gives the least bad consequences so that is
probably why it is used.
If there is a way for the kernel/initrd to check if a particular swap
partition has valid hibernation data on it, then not formatting the
swap might be a good idea.
Again I think the best solution to that would to simply inform the
user they should use a different swap partition if they are planning to
use hibernate. Because, correct me if I am wrong if they have
hibernation data on the partition and start another distro its going to
write over that information anyway isn't it?
Taking this up with the Debian installer developers at
debian-boot@lists.debian.org is a good idea, but this issue spans
several distributions as far as I can tell. Giving the users of Debian
and its derivatives the information they require to make informed
decisions about the setup of their machine is something we should all be
doing in some form or another. I will send a mailing to the mailing
list above and talk to them about getting a solution worked out in the
Debian installer. Going through and updating fstab might not be
"elegant", but after being informed of the cons of sharing swap they
choose to use this method then I see no problem with doing it this way
in my installer.
Again I thank you both for your response on this, Cheers.
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