Just another trying-to-be-a-geek's blog
Posts tagged disk
Adventure with dd
Nov 13th
I was about to do a big experiment with with lappi (laptop) which included blanking its HD. Naturally i would have liked to have my current state preserved and restored after the experiment was complete. So the first thing that came to my mind was doing a dd image of whole HD and saving it on a USB Drive. I started looking for alternates, found many cloning softwares like partimage (rejected, only works on partitions, i need something for whole disk), clonezilla, filezilla, PING and etc.
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vm.swappiness tweaks
Oct 3rd
First lets revise the basics.
In terms of performance, small storage devices are faster e.g. registers are faster than ram, RAM is faster than hard disk. And Swap is a dedicated partition to be used as paging alternate to RAM when there is not much RAM available.
Now how linux decides when to use swap or not? There is a sysctl parameter called vm.swappiness that is used by linux to decide. vm.swappiness is the kernel parameter that controls how kernel favors swap over RAM. By default its value is 60. So as you guess as value of 0 in the parameter would tell linux More >
