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

[Mark Fraser]

On Tuesday 25 May 2010 08:13:19 Alan Pope wrote:
> 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

IIRC You also have to make sure that /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume also 
points to the new swap partition and then update initramfs.
-- 
Registered Linux User #466407 http://counter.li.org