I forgot the swap partition.

RLFontan

Hey guys, what's up?

When installing Solus MATE i just forgot the swap partition. If i resize the HD i keep my files through gparted, i put my files at risk?

i5 7400, 16GB RAM, Gtx 1060 6GB.

Justin

Any disk changes put files at risk. You can do a file-based swap if you want, that's less risky. There's a fair few guides around online.

XerXes

If you have an SSD, swap is pointless.

RLFontan

XerXes Why? I actually have a SSD.

Justin

XerXes What?! SWAP is about RAM, not HDD/SSD.

PerfMonk

Even with a SSD you will need swap. swap is the virtual extension of your memory. He has 16G of memory but if he needs more than 16G (who knows) then he is in trouble whatever disk he has. But 16G may be a lot, it depends what you do ...

XerXes

PerfMonk

True. IF he does a lot of heavy lifting, like compiling massive apps, then swap may be necessary. But normally it's not.

But if he does a lot of heavy lifting, that swap partition will get pounded like a biatch in the same sectors and will receive increased wear.

kyrios

Personally with the same amount of RAM, I create a relatively small swap file (size from a few hundred MB to a few GB) and I set the swappiness to 1 (tell the system to use the minimum possible swap).

The drawback is the you can't hibernate with such a solution (but SSD boots fast, especially on Solus and suspend to RAM is available). An advantage if you use encryption is that the swap file is also automatically encrypted since it's lies on the partition (the swap partition is rarely encrypted among other things to allow suspend to disk to work).

Justin

kyrios 32GB RAM, even I needed SWAP at one point 😃

[deleted]

as far as i know, you can't hibernate with a swap file. It has to be a swap partition for that. Could have changed in the meantime, so i'm not sure.

RLFontan

Okay, i just did the swap file using this:

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/14/html/Storage_Administration_Guide/s2-swap-creating-file.html

But i have a doubt, if i want to remove this?

The hibernation is something i have on my head right now: i did it in a way it does not have actually 16GB of RAM but almost it. I mean, in theory i did the thing to have 16GB of swap file, but it just have 15.x or something.

But to be fair, i think i will not reinstall the system just for hibernation, but would be nice to now how to remove the swap file.

Ty!

kyrios

RLFontan You can't do hibernation with a swap file. It requires a swap partition.
To remove the swap file simply do but do not forget to remove it from your /etc/fstab or you'll get problems when you'll reboot next time

sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo rm /swapfile

dbarron

Basically the reverse of the creation process. Deactivate it for swap (swapoff) , remove the file, remove from /etc/fstab. Done.

RLFontan

Ty guys! I consider this problem solved!