Questions re swap and hibernate interaction on 8 gig machine

[Robert Brockway]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2010, D. Hugh Redelmeier wrote:

> | The other main reason for swap is the one the OP asked about - hibernation.
>
> You don't mention that on your page.  Should you?

Hi hugh.  It's actually mentioned on a different page:

http://practicalsysadmin.com/wiki/index.php/Swap_file

I probably should highlight it on the other page too.

> | [1] Last time I checked.  Theoretically it is possible.  I'd love to hear this
> | had been fixed but I haven't seen any reports.
>
> Do you meand "you can't hibernate to a swap file"?  Is that
> restriction documented somewhere (I haven't looked very hard)?

Exactly.  When I tried to do it, hibernating to a swap file failed.  I'm 
sure I did find documentation on that at some point.  I keep an eye out to 
see if the limitation has been fixed.

> If you really mean that the system cannot swap to a swap file, is that
> documented somewhere?  The swapon(8) awkwardly kind of says that a
> file can be used.  mkswap(8) talks about how to initialize a swap file.

You most definitely can swap to a swap file (otherwise it would be 
useless).  In fact a swap file is as efficient as a swap partition under 
linux 2.6 kernels.

My preference is to use swap files due to their advantages except on 
laptops due to the desire to hibernate.

Cheers,

Rob

-- 
Email: robert-5LEc/6Zm6xCUd8a0hrldnti2O/JbrIOy at public.gmane.org		Linux counter ID #16440
IRC: Solver (OFTC & Freenode)
Web: http://www.practicalsysadmin.com
Open Source: The revolution that silently changed the world
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists