Do I need a swap *partition* to use hibernation?

[Bo Berglund]

I am repurposing a 9 year old HP Elitebook 8440w laptop as a Ubuntu
development machine. It has 8GB of RAM.

During this configuration I have ran across suspend/hibernation
problems.
To enable hibernation there seems to be a number of steps to take and
one I cannot wrap my head around is *where* hibernate data are stuffed
on the disk?

It seems like it will be on the swap partition, but my Ubuntu 18.04
LTS installation did not create such a partition and when I look on
the net most often swap seems to equal a *file* placed somewhere in
the regular file system...

I have about 30 GB of free unallocated space on my 250 GB SSD and
would like to know if it should be used as a swap partition for
storing the hibernate data?

If so exactly how does one create a swap partition using Gparted?


-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden