On Friday, 29 July 2011 13:30:18 Michael Mol did opine thusly: > On Fri, Jul 29, 2011 at 1:23 PM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: > > Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo <at> gmail.com> writes: > > I also intend to use ext4 for all 3 partitions, boot,root,swap; > > unless there exist a strong, compelling reason to use > > ext-2 for the boot partition ??? ease of recovery ? > > I gather that it's now possible to put your swap in a swap file on a > filesystem, as opposed to giving it its own partition, but...why?
A swap partition is permanent - you pretty much always have it all the time. You might not have it swapon'ed all the time, but the several GB it takes up is always consumed on the disk. You can't easily free up disk space to make room for a temporary swap partition, usually something has to be unmounted first (to then be "fs-reduced" to make space). If that partition is the only one (common on desktop systems) it is mounted at / and you can't unmount it. Swap *files* solve all these problems, all you need is enough free space on the filesystems to accommodate the temporary swap you need. LVM also goes a long way towards making this easier, but dealing with LVM and mkswap is considerably more involved than just making a swap file. Rules of thumb: Permanent swap = use a swap partition Temporary swap = use a swap file. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
