On Nov 18, 2016, at 6:44 AM, Dimitri John Ledkov <x...@ubuntu.com> wrote: > > Package: wnpp > Owner: Dimitri John Ledkov <x...@ubuntu.com> > Severity: wishlist > > * Package name : partman-swapfile > Version : 1 > Upstream Author : d-i team > * URL or Web page : d-i > * License : GPL > Description : add support for creating swapfiles > > I am working on minimising number of partitions used in the default > instalations in Ubuntu. One of the things I have done already in Ubuntu is to > tweak and not use dedicated /boot partition for non-encrypted LVM based > installations. Simply by tweaking the partman-auto recipes, on > architectures/bootloaders that support booting off LVM. > > Another thing I am investigating is moving away from swap partitions to > swap files, on non-lvm installations. This will involve tweaking the > default partman-auto recipes & the no-swap warning. > > However, to provide swapfiles out of the box I wrote this > partman-swapfile module which hooks into /lib/partman/finish.d to create > /target/swapfile with an appropriate stanza in /target/etc/fstab. Care > is taken not to create swapfiles uncessory, reuse existing one, or do > nothing if a swap partition is already present, or swapfiles not > supported on a given filesystem (e.g. btrfs). > > There are two control options to configure the size of the > swapfile. Absolute size, and percentage of free space on the > rootfs. The defaults are 2GB and 5%, meaning the swapfile will be 2GB in > size or 5% of the free space on rootfs, whichever is lower. Setting the > size or percentage to zero will skip creating the swapfile. This is a > strategy to make sure there is some swap available, without wasting too > much of disk space on high-memory-to-disk ratio systems (e.g. 1TB of RAM > with a 200GB hard drive). > > I am not at all sure if this functionality is at all welcomed, needed, > or will generate any interest. I do not know if it's wanted to be > available by default in Debian's d-i. At the moment I created a git > repository in the d-i team, and plan to upload this to experimental for > people to try this out. > > On the implementation side, swapfile is allocated using fallocate (if > avaialble and target filesystem creates files without holes using > fallocate) otherwise "slow" dd is used. This makes swapfile creation > really quick on ext4 rootfs. > > All the glory details are here: > https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/d-i/partman-swapfile.git/tree/finish.d
I am happy that swap partitions are finally going away. Is there any reason to do all of the above rather than install swapspace? http://pqxx.org/development/swapspace <http://pqxx.org/development/swapspace> I’ve manually partitions with no swap and installed swapspace after install for years with great success. Thanks, — Jay
