Resize Swap Partitions On Red Hat Linux

Resize swap partitions on Red Hat Linux Published by ben

on August 12, 2008

in Enterprise Linux . 1 CommentTags: linux, red hat.

First of all a little disclaimer - although I've done this a few times and never had any problems, one should never consider resizing partitions a completely foolproof exercise. Things can go wrong. With regards to swap though, don't worry if your swap partition is destroyed as this will not harm your system - most healthy systems will not ever need swap and unlike Windows, Linux only starts using swap when it needs it and can quite easily survive without it. You can trash it and format it as many times as you like as long as it's not in use. And of course take backups of any important data first! Resize swap partition in Red Hat Linux

•

Is your swap on a logical volume (LVM)? If so then skip below to the LVM section. If not then read on:

•

Download gparted (Gnome Partition Manager), burn the iso and then boot into it.

•

Gparted will identify the filesystems on each partition so your target will be clearly labelled as swap.

•

Reize your partitions as required. Try to minimise the overall number of resize and move operations as this can take several hours to complete.

When you reboot swap not be enabled - if you check using top (or htop) orfree -m, you will see 0 mb of swap available. The reason for this is the UUID of the partition changed when it was resized by GParted, and this confuses the system when it tries to mount the volumes in /etc/fstab. The solution is to relabel your swap partition, by reformatting it as swap and specifying the correct label. fdisk -l | grep swap Note down the device name of your swap partition. e.g:

/dev/cciss/c0d0p3 1926 3837 15358140 82 Linux swap Make a note of the label for the swap partition from fstab: cat /etc/fstab | grep swap e.g. LABEL=SW-cciss/c0d0p3 swap Now format your partition as swap, specifiying the label exactly as shown in the fstab. mkswap /dev/cciss/c0d0p3 -L SW-cciss/c0d0p3 You can then enable the swap space straight away by using swapondevicename, or just reboot and check with free -m again, and all should be ok. Resizing

swap

on

LVM

If your swap partition is on a logical volume it can be resized without rebooting your system. However you will need free space to extend into, if you do not have free space you will need to shrink another volume or add another physical disk into your volume group (see this post which explains how to do this). cat

/etc/fstab

|

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap

swap

grep defaults

swap

00

lvdisplay will show you the size of your logical volume: lvdisplay /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 ---

Logical

LV

Name

VG LV LV LV #

volume

--/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

Name UUID

VolGroup00 RVIFz3-B8kp-z9KV-JYtG-N997-JOQ6-ETaJaJ

Write

Access Status open

read/write available 1

LV

Size

512.00

Current

MB

LE

24

Segments

1

Allocation

inherit

Read

ahead

Block device

sectors

0

253:1

To resize an LVM you need to unmount it, or in this case swapoff. swapoff /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 Resizing the volume to 768Mb (assuming you have the space to extend into) lvresize

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

Extending

logical

volume

-L

LogVol01

to

768M 768.00

MB

Logical volume LogVol01 successfully resized swapon

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

free

-m

total

used

Mem:

375

-/+ Swap:

free 343 buffers/cache:

767

0

767

shared 32

buffers 0 174

cached 48

120 201