mkswap
set up a Linux swap area
see also :
fdisk - swapon
Synopsis
mkswap
[options] device [size]
add an example, a script, a trick and tips
examples
no example yet ...
... Feel free to add your own example above to help other Linux-lovers !
description
mkswap
sets up a Linux swap area on a device or in a file.
The
device argument will usually be a disk partition
(something like /dev/sdb7) but can also be a file.
The Linux kernel does not look at partition IDs, but many
installation scripts will assume that partitions of hex type
82 (LINUX_SWAP) are meant to be swap partitions.
(Warning: Solaris also uses this type. Be careful not to
kill your Solaris partitions.)
The size
parameter is superfluous but retained for backwards
compatibility. (It specifies the desired size of the swap
area in 1024-byte blocks. mkswap will use the entire
partition or file if it is omitted. Specifying it is unwise
-- a typo may destroy your disk.)
After creating
the swap area, you need the swapon command to start
using it. Usually swap areas are listed in /etc/fstab
so that they can be taken into use at boot time by a
swapon -a command in some boot script.
options
-c,
--check
Check the device (if it is a
block device) for bad blocks before creating the swap area.
If any bad blocks are found, the count is printed.
-f,
--force
Go ahead even if the command is
stupid. This allows the creation of a swap area larger than
the file or partition it resides on.
Also, without
this option, mkswap will refuse to erase the first
block on a device with a partition table and on a whole disk
(e.g. /dev/sda).
-L,
--label label
Specify a label for the
device, to allow swapon by label.
-p,
--pagesize size
Specify the page size
(in bytes) to use. This option is usually unnecessary;
mkswap reads the size from the kernel.
-U,
--uuid UUID
Specify the UUID to use.
The default is to generate a UUID.
-v,
--swapversion 1
Specify the swap-space version.
(This option is currently pointless, as the old -v
0 option has become obsolete and now only -v
1 is supported. The kernel has not supported v0
swap-space format since 2.5.22 (June 2002). The new version
v1 is supported since 2.1.117 (August 1998).)
-h,
--help
Display help text and exit.
-V,
--version
Display version information and
exit.
availability
The mkswap command is part of the util-linux package and is
available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
notes
The maximum useful size of a swap area depends on the
architecture and the kernel version. It is roughly 2GiB on i386,
PPC, m68k and ARM, 1GiB on sparc, 512MiB on mips, 128GiB on
alpha, and 3TiB on sparc64. For kernels after 2.3.3 (May 1999)
there is no such limitation.
Note that before version 2.1.117 the kernel allocated one byte
for each page, while it now allocates two bytes, so that taking
into use a swap area of 2 GiB might require 2 MiB of kernel
memory.
Presently, Linux allows 32 swap areas (this was 8 before Linux
2.4.10 (Sep 2001)). The areas in use can be seen in the file
/proc/swaps (since 2.1.25 (Sep 1997)).
mkswap refuses areas smaller than 10 pages.
If you don’t know the page size that your machine uses, you may
be able to look it up with "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (or you may not --
the contents of this file depend on architecture and kernel
version).
To set up a swap file, it is necessary to create that file before
initializing it with mkswap, e.g. using a command like
# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1024 count=65536
Note that a swap file must not contain any holes (so, using
cp(1) to create the file is not acceptable).
warning
The swap header does not touch the first block. A boot loader or
disk label can be there, but it is not a recommended setup. The
recommended setup is to use a separate partition for a Linux swap
area.
mkswap, like many others mkfs-like utils, erases the
first partition block to make any previous filesystem
invisible.
However, mkswap refuses to erase the first block on a
device with a disk label (SUN, BSD, ...) and on a whole disk
(e.g. /dev/sda).
see also
fdisk ,
swapon