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pmatos
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Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 1246
Location: Eckental, Germany
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 Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 12:57 pm Post subject: Activating swap file |
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Hello all,
I have installed for the first time Gentoo on a macbook and it worked flawlessly but I followed the [wiki] suggestion of creating a swap file instead of a swap partition, however, I don't know how to activate the swap file on boot. I have been doing swapon manually but it is not convenient. Usually you would do it in fstab [in case of it being a partition] but what if it is a file?
Cheers,
Paulo Matos |
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dnadesign
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Joined: 23 Dec 2006
Posts: 172
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 1:22 pm Post subject: |
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Hi, try adding this to your fstab:
| Code: | | /path/to/swap/file none swap sw,loop 0 0 |
It mounts a file through a loopback device, so it acts as a partition. Should work as a swap partition, but I didn't test it yet.
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MacBook Pro 5.1
Intel C2D 2.53 GHz, 4GB RAM DDR3, GF 9400M and 9600M GT 512MB |
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pmatos
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Joined: 06 Jun 2003
Posts: 1246
Location: Eckental, Germany
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| Posted: Tue May 20, 2008 1:30 pm Post subject: |
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| dnadesign wrote: | Hi, try adding this to your fstab:
| Code: | | /path/to/swap/file none swap sw,loop 0 0 |
It mounts a file through a loopback device, so it acts as a partition. Should work as a swap partition, but I didn't test it yet. |
Thanks, I will try that. |
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dnadesign
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Joined: 23 Dec 2006
Posts: 172
Location: Poland
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| Posted: Wed May 21, 2008 1:26 am Post subject: |
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| pmatos wrote: | | Thanks, I will try that. |
Ok, so I tested it and there's a few things missing. Follow those simple steps, to get a swap file.
1. Create a file called, for example, /swapfile of a needed size (if this example 1M means 1 million blocks, which will give you a 512MB file):
| Code: | | dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile count=1M |
2. Use mkswap to get your file ready for swaping:
3. Make a fstab entry:
| Code: | | /swapfile none swap sw,loop 0 0 |
4. Run as root to activate your file swap space:
The fstab entry will make sure that it is correctly mounted on startup (one of the rc scripts has a call to "swapon -a"). If you have trouble using "swapon" then try chown'ing the file to root (I did it before activating the swapfile, but it shouldn't be necessary).
Enjoy your additional swap space. 
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MacBook Pro 5.1
Intel C2D 2.53 GHz, 4GB RAM DDR3, GF 9400M and 9600M GT 512MB |
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Installing Gentoo
