.SH NOTES
The maximum useful size of a swap area depends on the architecture and
the kernel version.
-It is roughly 2GiB on i386, PPC, m68k and ARM, 1GiB on sparc, 512MiB on mips,
-128GiB on alpha, and 3TiB on sparc64. For kernels after 2.3.3 (May 1999) there is no
-such limitation.
The maximum number of the pages that is possible to address by swap area header
is 4294967295 (UINT_MAX). The remaining space on the swap device is ignored.
-Note that before version 2.1.117 the kernel allocated one byte for each page,
-while it now allocates two bytes, so that taking into use a swap area of 2 GiB
-might require 2 MiB of kernel memory.
-
-Presently, Linux allows 32 swap areas (this was 8 before Linux 2.4.10 (Sep 2001)).
+Presently, Linux allows 32 swap areas.
The areas in use can be seen in the file
.I /proc/swaps
-(since 2.1.25 (Sep 1997)).
.B mkswap
refuses areas smaller than 10 pages.