linux kernel problem (disklabel and swap)

hi

i recently had the problem with a bsd disklabel and swap and as someone suggested, the swap slice did not have SWAPSPACE in it and that running mkswap would fix this. sure enough it did, but then i wondered why swapon allowed /dev/hda3 as a valid swap. so i had a look and SWAPSPACE2 was there, right at the start of the openbsd partition, inside the disklabel. so i have come to the conclusion that openbsd tells the world via the disklabel that a partition/slice is swap rather than at the start of the swap slice. the linux kernel does not know this and wants SWAPSPACE2 at the start of the partition/slice. to test this i booted up openbsd and forced it to swap. it wrote over the SWAPSPACE2 in the slice. so i think that the linux kernel needs to be fix so that if an openbsd partition exists, the kernel expects SWAPSPACE2 in the disklabel rather than the actual swap slice. i don't know if this is true for other *BSD though.

i hope this helps.

thanks, daniel.

I don't know about openbsd, but this sounds rather unlikely. More likely is that you (or some installation script run by you) marked that partition as swapspace.
mkswap for SWAPSPACE2 will preserve the first 1024 bytes, so it is possible that you did this mkswap without destroying the disklabel.
Note that partition numbering is a black art, especially when you mix several types of partition table. The name (number) of your partition may depend on kernel version and on for what partition table types you have support in your kernel.