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Old Vintage Computing Research: Dusting Off Dreamcast Linux

(oldvcr.blogspot.com)
163 points rbanffy | 2 comments | 14 Nov 24 20:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.696s | source
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yjftsjthsd-h ◴[15 Nov 24 04:35 UTC] No.42144002[source]▶
> The other problem we need to solve is swap. Linux, or at least not this Linux, won't let you use a swapfile hosted over NFS; swapon will give you an illegal argument error and refuse to enable it.

To my shock, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_block_device says

> The protocol was originally developed for Linux 2.1.55 and released in 1997.

so I wonder if you could use that? It's better suited to swap anyways.

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1. rusk ◴[15 Nov 24 08:10 UTC] No.42144847[source]▶
Hold on now. Swap over NFS? I’m amazed this is viable. I guess the difference between line and device speed wasn’t as vast as it is now.

Having read the article it makes more sense. They need additional capacity for the RAM disk.

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2. ssl-3 ◴[16 Nov 24 03:47 UTC] No.42153977[source]▶
In this context, it is less about viability and more about just getting things to work at even the slowest of speeds.

Nobody does swap over things like NFS or NBD unless they have to.

(Even in the Dreamcast days, common home networks were vastly slower than local disk.)