On Sun, Feb 01, 2026 at 07:29:36AM +0200, ????????? wrote:
> Could you please elaborate?
> Modern hardware has enough RAM to be able to theoretically run without swap.
Yes, and we have been doing this for many years on other architecures.
However there must be a bug somewhere in the arm64 code that is mitigated by
configuring swap - even a tiny swap partiiton of 32 Mb seems to mitigate the
effects, on a machine with over 3 Gb of physical ram free.
I spent a day or so looking at the code a few years ago, but found nothing
obvious. Since there was an obvious work-around, I moved on to other more
important things.
> If you don't need to hibernate, disabling swap to save NVRAM sounds
> reasonable to me.
Presumably by NVRAM you mean writes to flash memory, (which is technically
NVRAM, but NVRAM is generally understood to mean CMOS ram for the RTC, etc).
Yes, in principle you are correct, but in practice it's not going to make much
of a difference, especially if the swap partition is very small.
Remember that by default the swap partition is used for crash dumps as well,
so most machines used for serious development are likely going to have large a
large swap partition configured.
So overall - if you configure your amd64 daily driver laptop to run without
swap to avoid wearing out the SSD, you'll _probably_ be OK.
If you have an esoteric machine of an architecture that only a handful of
other people are using, then I would presume that they are mostly running
with swap, and if you don't configure swap then you are exercising code paths
that are less well tested.
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