[bf1942] Swap Partition Problem

Scratch Monkey ScratchMonkey at SewingWitch.com
Wed Mar 12 01:34:19 EST 2003


--On Tuesday, March 11, 2003 6:44 PM +0100 "Reinder P. Gerritsen"
<reinder at strikerz.net> wrote:

> Dunno how RedHat manages it's swap by default, I'm not much of a SysV
> style linux player, but on slackware, it's all in the fstab:

Almost. fstab doesn't *do* anything. It's just the data that some other
thing consults, typically the swapon command.

My RH8 system has these two lines in /etc/fstab:

/dev/hdc8               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0
/dev/hda8               swap                    swap    defaults        0 0

I've got a couple of 80 GB IDE disks running mirrored RAID, but each also
provides a swap partition.

In Red Hat's /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (shell script invoked from the si entry
in /etc/inittab), "swapon -a -e" is invoked to mount all swap partitions
from /etc/fstab.

For those new to Linux, /etc/inittab is the "autoexec.bat" of Linux,
telling the system what to run when it starts. Read the man page for init
and inittab to understand how they work. Most distros start some shell
script from /etc/inittab to complete the boot process. It's instructive to
walk through these scripts to learn what your distro does at boot time.



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