[CentOS] what would be happen if swap partition is not?

[Geoff Galitz]

> 
> A swap partition is not essential to system operation so long as you
> have enough RAM.  Most modern systems have more then enough RAM and can
> probably live without a swap partition .


True, but to answer the original question:  If a system without a swap
device needs to swap (and cannot) it will crash with an appropriate error
message.  Hopefully you would not get to that point; your processes should
be killed when they run out of memory, but Linux's memory management scheme
is not the simplest and you can run into issues where the kernel is unable
to avoid a swapping situation.

-geoff

---------------------------------
Geoff Galitz
Blankenheim NRW, Germany
http://www.galitz.org/
http://german-way.com/blog/