Swap over the network?

[Mark Hahn]

> Do you know if it is currently possible to have diskless nodes
> having their swap over the network ?

it's a bit risque, since net IO allocates memory, and usually
swapping happens because you're low on memory.  but it apparently
can be done - the topic comes up on the kernel list now and then,
most recently using NBD - network block driver, I think.

I doubt that swapping over NFS would be as easy, since NFS is a 
far more complicated beast.

omitting swap is usually a bad idea, since various revisions of the VM
have been unstable in the absence of swap - they used swapcache 
allocation as a book-keeping aid, and didn't necessarily generate 
any swap *traffic*.

regards, mark hahn.