How would you implement a swap on such a filesystem? You couldn't, could you?
Oh, and the jokes about having NILFS on your hard drive are going to be so lame...
Oh, and the jokes about having NILFS on your hard drive are going to be so lame...
The days of "swap" are numbered. The future is a smart memory hierarchy that uses knowledge about size/speed tradeoffs to make smart decisions about where to store things, but that won't look much like "swap".
Even with SSDs, it has become very unusual for "the system is currently swapping" to mean anything other than "the system's performance characteristics just became completely unacceptable". I stopped using a swap partition somewhere around 512MB to 1GB, and now my laptop that I didn't even try to max out the memory on shipped with 4GB. I can't hardly even fill up the cached buffers in 4GB in any reasonable period of time.
(Please note the difference between "very unusual" and "never". In fact, I can cite a server in my care that benefits from using a bit of swap. But that server is the exception, not the rule.)
Further, there may be some performance benefit to swapping idle process memory to make room for more buffer cache.
It's true that for interactive use (especially a laptop with spun-down drives), you may be happy without swap. But I don't see the facility being mothballed.
I guess that's mostly a non-issue, as on Linux you usually don't use a swap file but a whole volume. There is support for using files, but you only use it as a last resort. Let's face it, if you know how to set up NILFS2 then you're probably able to create a swap partition.
Why not? It's just a filesystem with layout that's a bit different to most, users of the filesystem should be completely oblivious to it.
Swap just needs a file it can randomly read and write to; if a fs can't provide such random access, it's not just swap it'll be useless for.
there's a node I'd like to fsck!
NILFS or MILFS whats the difference? About 35 years ...awwwww
/me ducks and covers