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On Friday, 29 July 2011 13:30:18 Michael Mol did opine thusly: |
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> On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:23 PM, James <wireless@×××××××××××.com> |
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wrote: |
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> > Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo <at> gmail.com> writes: |
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> > I also intend to use ext4 for all 3 partitions, boot,root,swap; |
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> > unless there exist a strong, compelling reason to use |
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> > ext-2 for the boot partition ??? ease of recovery ? |
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> |
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> I gather that it's now possible to put your swap in a swap file on a |
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> filesystem, as opposed to giving it its own partition, but...why? |
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A swap partition is permanent - you pretty much always have it all the |
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time. You might not have it swapon'ed all the time, but the several GB |
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it takes up is always consumed on the disk. You can't easily free up |
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disk space to make room for a temporary swap partition, usually |
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something has to be unmounted first (to then be "fs-reduced" to make |
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space). If that partition is the only one (common on desktop systems) |
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it is mounted at / and you can't unmount it. |
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Swap *files* solve all these problems, all you need is enough free |
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space on the filesystems to accommodate the temporary swap you need. |
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LVM also goes a long way towards making this easier, but dealing with |
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LVM and mkswap is considerably more involved than just making a swap |
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file. |
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Rules of thumb: |
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Permanent swap = use a swap partition |
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Temporary swap = use a swap file. |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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