Swap file in scyld

[Sean Dilda]

On Wed, 23 May 2001, Josh Puckett (EUS) wrote:

> OK, this if my first post here, as you can probably tell. I am working on a beowulf cluster of some older machines we have in our lab. I have ran in to a small problem. We have 5 machines with 32mb of ram, and I wanted to use those as well as the others I have. However, using a default Scyld install you need something like 60mb of ram. No problem, I thought a swap file would fix the problem. I un-commented the swap line in the fstab, and left it as 40960 size. However the node still stops as its "copying libraries", exactly the same as before, when the 32mb of ram is full. 1MB of the swap file is supposedly used, which seems strange, because one would think none of it has been used. Any ideas on how to get the swap file going?

What is happening is by default, the Scyld system uses a ramdisk as / on
the slave nodes.  This ramdisk is filling up.  If you look at the
install guide (http://www.scyld.com/support/docs/beoinstall.html) there
are instructions on how to partition the harddrives on slave nodes.  I'd
suggest you do this, then modify the fstab for the slave nodes so that /
is actually a harddrive partition and not a ramdisk.  Then comment the
line for the ramdisk.  This will solve your problem.

As far as swap, your swap is most likely working, however ramdisks never
get swapped out, so using swap won't solve this particular problem.
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