[ubuntu-uk] ubuntu-uk Digest, Vol 61, Issue 67

[Alan Pope]

On 25 May 2010 06:48, Rowan Berkeley <rowan.berkeley at googlemail.com> wrote:
> I'm not quite clear about the process of switching from the old swap
> partition to the new one, Aymeric. I expect if the machine finds itself
> without any swap partition at all it will die a horrible death

Nope. Most computers can run just fine with no swap at all. The issue
comes when you run out of memory as you load big programs and data.
Eventually there will be no more space in memory to load stuff and the
kernel will start killing off programs (the OOM [out of memory] killer
does this).

It's perfectly possible to run with no swap during the process of
moving / recreating swap temporarily.

> and be
> completely unrecoverable except by using another machine to re-write the
> hard disk contents, so I don't want any risk of that. Could you explain
> how the hibernate command works? Is the idea that on the next start-up,
> the machine will switch to using the new swap partition? How can I be
> certain it is no longer using the old one, after the next start-up? I
> have to be 100% of this before deleting the old swap partition.
>

swapon -s will list the swap partitions in use:-


alan at ubuntu-uk:~$ swapon -s
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda2                               partition       262136  97792   -1

Cheers,
Al.