Dustpuppy Posted July 5, 2006 Report Share Posted July 5, 2006 (edited) I've re-installed 2006 on desktop 1 and now have a problem with the swap space. On boot, I get the following a few lines apart in the startup sequence: activating swap partitions [OK] enabling swap space [failed, device or resource busy] I previously installed FC5 to see what it was like, and that set up the spare space on my first harddrive (20GB) and the whole of the second drive (40MB) as a logical volume. I kept this and told Mandriva to auto-allocate and then format it, which it did into 5.9 GB root, 1 GB swap and the rest home. Is the swap space enabled or not? Is there any way I can tell? It doesn't seem that slow, but I haven't run anything very big on it. Edited July 8, 2006 by Dustpuppy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ilia_kr Posted July 5, 2006 Report Share Posted July 5, 2006 I'm not shure, but you can check in gnome system monitor. As I see you use KDE, maybe Ksysquard shows the amaunt of swap and if it is enabled or not, like in gnome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 5, 2006 Report Share Posted July 5, 2006 I would do this: free at a console prompt, and you can see if swap is active. Here is an example of how it looks active with 1GB swap: [ian@europa ~]$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 515304 506632 8672 0 36816 301684 -/+ buffers/cache: 168132 347172 Swap: 996020 2604 993416 If not, what you can do is this: fdisk -l one of the partitions will be listed as type "82" which is Linux swap, it should also say this against it. What you can now do is: mkswap /dev/xxxxx where xxxxx is your device that corresponds to swap. You can then turn it on without rebooting using: swapon /dev/xxxxx again where xxxxx is your device that corresponds to swap. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted July 5, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 5, 2006 Ok... I tried gnome system monitor, and it came up with zero out of 1GB swap used. It also doesn't list swap in the devices: it lists /dev/hda1 (/mnt/windows), /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-1 (/) and /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-3 (/home). Doing "free" lists 1GB swap with 0 used. I then tried to make /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-2 into swap, but when I turned it on it said "device or resource busy". fdisk -l gives Disk /dev/hda: 61.4 GB, 61492838400 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 7476 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hda1 * 1 4472 35921308+ 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/hda3 4486 7476 24025207+ 8e Linux LVM Disk /dev/hdb: 40.9 GB, 40982151168 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4982 cylinders Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/hdb1 * 1 4982 40017883+ 8e Linux LVM :unsure: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted July 6, 2006 Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 As far as I know, swap is automatically activated i.e., mounted, and does not need to be manually mounted or dealt with in any way. When you open Kde Control Centre and look at Information then Memory you will see it shown there together with your other memory and how much is being used and what is available. I think you are concerning yourself with a non issue here. If it set up 1Gb for swap then it is twice what is realistically needed anyhow and if you already have hard memory in excess of 512Mb then it is hardly ever going to use swap. I have 1Gb of memory and 512Mb of swap and swap is never touched. Some people with 1Gb or more have done away with swap altogether. Try not to see Linux as any more complicated than it actually is and you will enjoy it a heck of a lot more. Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 6, 2006 Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 It seems you've used LVM when partitioning your disks. Have you done this so that it looks like one large partition across the two disks? This will be why no swap partition exists when you use fdisk -l. Can you post your /etc/fstab, and also the results of the free command, and I'll check it out. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted July 6, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 I have 1Gb of memory and 512Mb of swap and swap is never touched. Some people with 1Gb or more have done away with swap altogether. That's interesting - so swap is only used when the physical memory is all being used? Try not to see Linux as any more complicated than it actually is and you will enjoy it a heck of a lot more. :D But making it complicated is all the fun! I had a perfectly working 2006 installation, and decided that as I'd evidently mastered the basics (wow, that only took me three years!) then I should start tinkering... So I trashed my system by trying to install KDE3.5 without reading the instructions. I then installed FC5 and ended up with a LVM which I'd never seen before. So then I re-installed 2006 to find my swap space couldn't activate (or maybe could...). So you see, I'm learning more now! Ian - thanks for your help on this. Yes, I'm using the LVM that the FC5 installation set up, which uses 20GB from the first disk and all of the second, and appeared as a separate tab on the partitioning setup of the mandy installer. /etc/fstab reads # This file is edited by fstab-sync - see 'man fstab-sync' for details/dev/VolGroup00/1 / ext3 defaults 1 1 /dev/VolGroup00/3 /home ext3 defaults 1 2 /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom2 auto umask=0022,user,iocharset=iso8859-15,codepage=850,noauto,ro,exec,users 0 0 none /mnt/floppy supermount dev=/dev/fd0,fs=ext2:vfat,--,umask=0022,iocharset=iso8859-15,sync,codepage=850 0 0 /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows ntfs umask=0022,nls=iso8859-15,ro 0 0 none /proc proc defaults 0 0 /dev/VolGroup00/2 swap swap defaults 0 0 and free gives total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 514924 404588 110336 0 18488 199692 -/+ buffers/cache: 186408 328516 Swap: 1146872 0 1146872 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 6, 2006 Report Share Posted July 6, 2006 Yes, you've got swap. It's within the LVM, which is why a standard fdisk -l doesn't report normal partitioning. Another alternative to LVM is using Raid0, which I tend to use, as it seems to work much faster. Or at least when I tried it on a system with Red Hat. So looks like you're OK anyhow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dustpuppy Posted July 8, 2006 Author Report Share Posted July 8, 2006 Thanks a lot for that! I'll look into raid... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edwardp Posted July 8, 2006 Report Share Posted July 8, 2006 (edited) I have 1Gb of memory and 512Mb of swap and swap is never touched. Some people with 1Gb or more have done away with swap altogether. That's interesting - so swap is only used when the physical memory is all being used? With a console window opened and also running the SeaMonkey suite, this is what "free" shows currently (with 512 Mb memory installed): bash-3.00$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 515708 484092 31616 0 64080 268496 -/+ buffers/cache: 151516 364192 Swap: 1028152 2596 1025556 Interesting to note that it shows over 31 Mb free, yet it found it necessary to use 2.6 Mb of the swap partition. On my slower computer (Intel Pentium/MMX 166 MHz, 196 Mb RAM), also with a Konsole window open and running SeaMonkey with swap turned on, "free" shows this: bash-3.00$ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 191216 187716 3500 0 15596 74276 -/+ buffers/cache: 97844 93372 Swap: 449780 2588 447192 With swap turned off, it shows: # free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 191216 187272 3944 0 14868 73652 -/+ buffers/cache: 98752 92464 Swap: 0 0 0 Edited July 8, 2006 by edwardp Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AussieJohn Posted July 8, 2006 Report Share Posted July 8, 2006 Obviously if swap is available then the system can decide to use it. If there is no swap then the system works around it. Quite normal I would have thought, for a superior system like Linux. :D Cheers. John. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 9, 2006 Report Share Posted July 9, 2006 Whats the value for swappiness? Type this to find out? cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness By default it's 60, I change it to 10, as it's supposed to help with using swap less than it should. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edwardp Posted July 9, 2006 Report Share Posted July 9, 2006 Whats the value for swappiness? Type this to find out? cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness By default it's 60, I change it to 10, as it's supposed to help with using swap less than it should. Not sure if this was directed to me, but... it shows 60. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted July 10, 2006 Report Share Posted July 10, 2006 OK, try this next. Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and at the bottom of the file add: vm.swappiness = 10 and reboot, or alternatively, do this to test it and also save a reboot: echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and then repeat the cat command above to verify it's now changed to 10. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edwardp Posted July 11, 2006 Report Share Posted July 11, 2006 Swappiness now shows 10. I'll try out some apps and report back. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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