Creating a swapfile partition in Linux? (127 MB max?)

[BigToque]

I remember when I installed RehHat 5.5 a long time ago, I needed to create a swap partition that could not be bigger than 127 MB. Is this still the case? Do I even need to create a separate swap partition still?

 

[Nothinman]

I believe the limit now is 2G, if that's even the limit. You can create swap files but they're not recommended, a swap partition is still the way most people do things.

 

[chsh1ca]

That's the limit on a single partition I believe nothinman, however, you can create multiple swap partitions and the kernel will use them. 😀

 

[Nothinman]

I know you can combine several partitions no matter what the max of 1 is, but I'm not sure if 2G is the upper limit for a single partition any more.

 

[Flatline]

If you need 2Gb of swap space, then you likely have other problems...

 

[drag]

hehe.

The old rule was double your RAM, but that's kinda nonsense now. I have a gig of ram! And since I last rebooted I have only manage to fill up half of it, which is pretty sad.

Empty ram is wasted ram....

Since 2.4 you don't need a swap partition anymore, but its still nice to have. 2.2 would screw up if you didn't have it.I use a 500meg partition and once I start swapping heavily then I know something is wrong and it gives me a chance to fix it before my computer starts killing off proccesses. And that is realy rare anyways.

Swap files are kinda noxious, reminds me too much from Win98. A partition is much faster anyways.

 

[chsh1ca]

Nothinman, I did some checking, this is from the mkswap (from 2.6.0) manpage:

In the new style swap area this is precisely what is done. The maximum useful size of a swap area now depends on the architecture. It is roughly 2GiB on i386, PPC, m68k, ARM, 1GiB on sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on alpha and 3TiB on sparc64.

The 2.6.x kernels can have 32 swap spaces.