All machines kickstarted here consistently have a swap partition with the wrong size. According to the RHEL5 manual: | To determine the size of the swap partition automatically, use the | --recommended option: | | swap --recommended | | The recommended maximum swap size for machines with less than 2GB of RAM is | twice the amount of RAM. For machines with 2GB or more, this recommendation | changes to 2GB plus the amount of RAM. However, the swap partition on all kickstarted machines is 2GB, regardless of RAM size. This is the relevant portion of the kickstart file: bootloader --location=mbr selinux --disabled reboot clearpart --all --initlabel part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=102 part / --fstype ext3 --size=20480 part swap --recommended part /var --fstype ext3 --size=1 --grow The kickstart setup is currently based on CentOS 5.2 (and I cannot move to 5.4 yet as this is a corporate setup affecting hundreds of machines). Hardcoding swap size isn't a good idea either because there's a range of different memory configurations. I could however confirm that a manual, graphical install from the 5.4 DVD with recommended settings creates 10GB swap on a 8GB RAM machine.