No Swap File

tarballedtux · 01-08-2003, 05:30 PM

Oooh, I was doing a periodic health check of my system and I noticed that I had no swap space available or used! I seems that swap was never turned. Here's my fstab:

/dev/hda1 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,owner,ro 0 0
/dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy auto noauto,owner 0 0
none /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0

I don't see a swap file in there do you? I'm using Slackware-current. How do I activate it?

--tarballedtux

DavidPhillips · 01-08-2003, 05:53 PM

Do you have a partition to use or are you going to create a file?
fstab

Code:

/dev/??? swap swap defaults 0 0

or

Code:

/root/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

create file

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/swapfile bs=1k count=262144

mkswap /root/swapfile

mount all swap files ( uses fstab entries )

Code:

swapon -a

tarballedtux · 01-08-2003, 06:18 PM

Yes! I did have a partition ready to go. I must of botched the SWAPADD I guess. Well it works at least I have swap available. That's sweet that Linux will turn on swap usage on live instead rebooting.

--tarballedtux

Bluesuperman · 01-09-2003, 05:29 AM

Depending on your system and the performance you want you do not need swap. I am running a PII 600, 128 MB RAM as a desktop. I am using KDE I always have at least 6 web browsers going, XMMS, Licq and a couple of konsoles. I turned off SWAP for about 4 days and really didn't notice a difference until I trid to installed WINE.

DavidPhillips · 01-09-2003, 02:07 PM

Why not have it for when you do need it.

This way you can use the memory you have, and avoid the system from crashing.

The kernel uses up to twice the physical ram for swap, and handles it well.