I haven’t tried Endeavour in a long time and just spun up a VM in Proxmox to install it on. I’m running through the installer now. I selected the i3 WM option, and didn’t select any desktop environments.
I notice that by default it selects No swap for the boot disk. Is that normal, or is it doing something strange because it’s inside a VM?
(All the articles I’ve read about whether or not swap is needed and whether or not a file is preferred over a partition assume a Linux installation on real physical hardware, so those aren’t as helpful as I’d have liked.)
Still not quite sure what to use here. I’m not concerned about running out of RAM, but since I’m in a VM that lives on a ZFS pool, I’m a bit concerned about blundering my way into write amplification on the host.
@dalto, after the discussion in another thread about swap, my impression was that the majority of the respondent were leaning in favor of the swap with some interesting and compelling arguments even for the systems that have plenty of RAM.
Do you think, as a general rule, swap should be recommended to users?
The question pops up regularly and many are still under the somewhat erroneous impression that swap is only extra RAM or it maybe harmful for SSDs.
If your answer, is positive, do you think that it would be a good idea to make the recommendation already in the installer where the choice is given to add swap or not?
Or even give the choice in the package section for zram-generator and enable it already during the install on a a simple config like ram/2 with some compression algorithm?
Yes. I have been thinking about this since the first post. Since Calamares has always worked that way, I never considered it before this.
Implementing zram support in the installer has been on my todo list for a while now. As has implementing support for proper resume with btrfs swapfiles. But, unfortunately, my todo list is huge at this point.
