Mark Hull-Richter wrote: > On 4/11/07, John Summerfield <debian at herakles.homelinux.org> wrote: >> >> >> There is no advantage*, with Linux 2.6 kernels, to having a swap >> partition over having a swap file. Swap files are more flexible, easier >> to manage. As a Linux Kernel Engineer, you should know that;-) >> >> * unless you're using suspend to disk, I'm not sure about that. > > > That's my title - I'm still working my way into it, and I'm learning as > fast > as I can. > > Actually, no, I didn't know that. The last kernel I was familiar with (for > about six months) was pre-2.0. > > Does that mean (and this applies to another thread along this line that's > also going on around here I think) that we don't need a swap partition at > all? Is the swap file automatic, or do we have to specify it (yeah, I > know, > rtfm, but where is t.f.m.?). I mostly do not have swap partitions, I do need to create them manually. Typically this: cd /var dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=$((1*1024*1024)) count=512 mkswap swapfile swapon swapfile You can (with a luck) do this when you find you need (more) swap. Then this: [root at ns ~]# grep swap /etc/fstab /var/swapfile swap swap auto [root at ns ~]# so it's on next time. Note that you can specify priorities, so one swap area's fully used before another is started. This is useful under VM where Linux often swaps to a ramdisk first, then real disk second. One organises alarms to go off to see why the penguin's behaving badly. -- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu Please do not reply off-list