swap

[Dan Jenkins]

Jonathan Linowes wrote:

>Does the swap area have to be a partition or can it be a file? 
>if it can, are there any disadvantage to doing this?
>I'm on RH9 and recently added a faster hard drive that's got plenty of space.
>
It can be a file. I'm not away of any disadvantages, though, if they are 
any, I hope to be enlightened by others.
I've shared the Windows swap file with Linux without a problem. As you 
have the space, there is no reason to
do this of course.

Just use a file name in /etc/fstab for your swap (like this):
/var/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0

Create the swap file with a command like this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
where count is number of KB (64 MB in this case)

Make it a swap file:
mkswap /var/swapfile

Make it active swap space by this:
swapon /var/swapfile
This should be done automatically during startup by the /etc/fstab entry.

That's it.

-- 
Dan Jenkins (dan at rastech.com)
Rastech Inc., Bedford, NH, USA --- 1-603-206-9951
*** Technical Support for over a Quarter Century