I am now installing Ubuntu without a swap partition and I use a swap file afterward.
Here’s the details from Ubuntu Swap FAQ:
Should I reinstall with more swap?
- Definitely no.
- With the 2.6 kernel, “a swap file is just as fast as a swap partition.”(Wikipedia:Paging, LKML).
How do I add more swap?
- Usually, people associate swap with a swap partition, maybe because they’ve been proposed to create a swap partition on install. In fact any file can be used as a swapping device, be it a partition or a conventional file. If you’re considering responsiveness, my advice: add more RAM. Swapping to a partition or a file won’t change anything.
- We will add more swap by adding a swap file.
- Adding more swap is a four-step process :
- a- Creating a file the size you want.
- b- Formatting that file to create a swapping device.
- c- Adding the swap to the running system.
- d- Making the change permanent.
- We will consider (as an example) a 512 M swap need.
- a- Creating a file the size you want :
- We will create a /mnt/512M.swap swap file.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/512M.swap bs=1M count=512
- What is important here is count=512, which means we want our file to contain 512 blocks of bs=1M, which means block size = 1 MegaBytes.
- Be careful *not* to do this dd of=/mnt/512M.swap bs=1M seek=512 count=0
Though the file grows to 512M immediately,it will have holes that makes it unusable.
- We will create a /mnt/512M.swap swap file.
- b- Formatting that file to create a swapping device :
sudo mkswap /mnt/512M.swap
- c- Adding the swap to the running system :
sudo swapon /mnt/512M.swap
- You can see with “cat /proc/meminfo” that your additionnal swap is now available.
- d- Making the change permanent :
- edit your /etc/fstab:
gksudo gedit /etc/fstab
- and add this line at the end of the file:
/mnt/512M.swap none swap sw 0 0
- save and reboot
- edit your /etc/fstab:
