Swap space

A swap partition is a partition on a disk that is not intended to be used as a filesystem. Instead, it is a part of the disk that is used to augment the main memory.

If you run out of memory and have set up a swap partition, the OS will be able to move pieces of memory to and from disk storage. This is called swapping because pieces of idle programs are swapped to the disk in exchange for active pieces residing on the disk.

View current swap usage

If you have a swap space established, the command free will show current usage:

free
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        16099420     3031572    10157652     1153144     2910196    11605820
Swap:        3145724           0     3145724

Create a swap partition

To use an existing disk partition as a swap you can run the command mkswap [device] and then swapon [device] to register the space with the kernel.

Add to fstab

You will want the swap to be activated every time the OS boots so add the following line to the fstab, where /sda3 is used as the example partition:

/dev/sda3e none swap sw 0 0

Create a swap file

// Add info here

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