Possibility to create swap partition if extended partition is out of space?

bhavisavla · 09-12-2011, 05:44 AM

I have a few questions:

1. Can we create a swap partition if no space is left in the extended partition?

2. How does the kernel priortize and decide about which files to swap? especially to cache or to swap?

Thanks

i92guboj · 09-12-2011, 06:39 AM

You can create a swap partition as long as you have free space AND you have less than four primary partitions.

If not, you can still create an empty sparse file, format it with mkswap and swapon it or add it to your fstab and reboot.

About the policies the kernel follow, it's all in the source code. I didn't ever bothered to check but it surely changes with kernel versions.