On 2/26/25 5:21 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
On Wed, 2025-02-26 at 16:17 -0500, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
Arg. the Install did not default a swap partition so I forgot to work it in when I divided the drive as I wanted...
I am using EXT4 for my / /boot /home partitions. Just plain partitioning. Been doing it this way for lots of builds.
But this time, I missed setting aside 16Gb as a physical swap partition, added to the memory swap. This system only has 16Gb memory, so the virtual swap starts out at 8Gb.
Since /dev/sdb4, /home is the last 800Gb with 500Gb unused, is there any way to safely shrink this partition 16Gb and then allocate that as swap?
You don't need a swap partition. It's simple to create a swap file ('man mkswap'). In fact before I upgraded my RAM to 32GB I got by with just zram (which is compressed and much faster than a hard drive), but YMMV of course. If zram is enough, the only time you actually need swap on secondary storage is if you want to hibernate (not suspend) your system.
poc
OK, I SHOULD have remembered that.
I thought that zram was now "built in" and that is why I am seeing:
$ free total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15616836 8473060 2279808 149220 5348312 7143776 Swap: 8388604 768 8387836
# zramctl NAME ALGORITHM DISKSIZE DATA COMPR TOTAL STREAMS MOUNTPOINT /dev/zram0 lzo-rle 8G 60K 12.9K 204K 4 [SWAP]
I did nothing to set up this zram swap and no swap partition is showing in /etc/fstab
Use zram until you REALLY need the memory for active apps (and with only 16GB that does happen), then bleed over to the physical swap. Or if you run out of battery on the flight because the outlets don't work then for hibernation.
Where is the settings for zram?
thanks