The interpretation of "warning: total configured swap (??? pages) exceeds maximum recommended amount (??? pages)"

FYI: Michal Meloun reported that the interpretation
of the likes of:

QUOTE
warning: total configured swap (. . . pages) exceeds maximum recommended amount (. . . pages).
warning: increase kern.maxswzone or reduce amount of swap.
END QUOTE

is that the the kernel is somewhat more likely to deadlock
or panic because it may need to allocate memory in order
to swap out some memory.

The purpose of swapping out that memory?: Likely to free
RAM for other uses. So it can need to allocate memory
first in order to free memory. This may not be possible,
depending on conditions at the time.

The indication was that such deadlocks/panics are very
rare, even if the system produced the warning lines.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com