In case anyone is curious if this would work, LTT tried it: https://youtu.be/minxwFqinpw
spoilers for how it works in the video:
Sadly it just crashes immediately because Google has measures in place to prevent this behavior, and the rest of the video is an ELI5 on swap space.
Thanks! I hate watching a whole video for something that could be a paragraph at most.
To be fair, the video covers a lot more than just that answer.
Very much possible, but I’m aware of what swap is and how does it work. That’s my problem with videos in general - if it was an article, I can easily skim through the parts I know and read only parts that interest me.
I totally understand. Articles are much better at actually finding information. Videos are more entertaining though. There’s nothing in that video that really couldn’t have been in an article.
Thank you! I was curious but not ten-minute-video curious. I wonder if there are other cloud providers without preventative measures measures in place.
The video also explains why it doesn’t really work; the latency is so large, the system is better off getting the files from local storage.
I kind of assumed that haha, this wouldn’t be something you’d do for practical purposes. Still fun though!
yeah, leak all swapped data into their cloud * shiver *
You’re right, we should add an encryption step as well!
Furiously sets up a LUKS swap partition on Google Drive
this hurts my brain
My ISP: what a wonderful thing you have there. I will definitely not charge you an arm and a leg for the bandwidth
Will kind-of-work for users with gigabit+ links, actually.
It really doesn’t …the latency is sooo bad
That’s why “kind-of-work”.
Like speaking third most Italian.
If it quacks, walks like a duck and looks like a duck - then it is a duck.
If it mounts like swap and you can use it as swap - then it is a swap space.
I vaguely recall that Linux has support for multiple tiers of paging space, with you able to assign priority.
googles
Yeah,
swaponhas a-pparameter`.https://linux.die.net/man/8/swapon
-p, --priority priority Specify the priority of the swap device. priority is a value between 0 and 32767. Higher numbers indicate higher priority. See swapon(2) for a full description of swap priorities. Add pri=value to the option field of /etc/fstab for use with swapon -a.So you shovel the priority below your local paging space, might be okay for some workloads.
I dunno if there’s any system to predictively migrate data between tiers of paging space, though. If it only pulls into main memory from low-priority paging space and does so a page at a time, that’s gonna be painful.
Also, this definitely increases the security risks associated with having sensitive material being paged out beyond the usual “someone might get your laptop and look at the paging space when it’s off if the paging space isn’t encrypted and you’re using software that doesn’t lock security-critical data in memory” stuff.
Not at all, it’s way too slow.
is that a whole petabyte of swap???
That’s one way of making your temp memory even slower.
could the filesystem driver get evicted to swap?
could the filesystem driver get evicted to swap?
Nope, it’s always in memory (while module is loaded).
