Unless I am mistaken, doesn't the contents of RAM get dumped to a SWAP device in the event of a kernel panic?
1. No one knows upfront, what causes the kernel panic. It might be well an issue with a hard drive.
2. If a hard drive IS working, nothing prevents any program including kernel to dump RAM on disk in a form of file, which can be easier recognized by admin, in case the machine does have an admin attached to that particular computer. On most (99%) of user laptops it is not the case.
The same can be said about any embedded things. So there is nobody who will look at it. And even fewer people are able to understand what it means.
3. Any causal program which is running on a computer from time to time saves its data on disk. None of them requires swap for that purpose.
4. Last but not least. What does word "swap" means? It doesn't mean a permanent data storage, neither a database and nothing else as well.
It does mean swap - an outsource of memory pages based on certain algorithm to another storage space, which is a hard drive for example!
The same page goes back into memory once there is enough room for it OR (unfortunately) it is required for a running program.
Nothing prevents any one to save his favorite movie on swap partition. Nothing prevents a man to shave with a knife. And many did in the past. But it is a wrong usage of the instrument which has been developed for a different purpose.
Am I wrong?