Swap space is not available after 15.1 installation

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1

I recently upgraded from 42.3 to 15.1 and have been trying to identify why the system goes into a state where it thrashes the disk for long periods and apparently uses 100% of the CPU. I’ve been bothering the Forum about an apparent Kmail or Firefox issue, but it seems to be much more fundamental.

The Gnome system-monitor reports that it’s getting low on RAM, and the Kinfocentre memory-display reports the swap-space is “Not available”, which seems pretty serious. I remember the installation process asked whether I wanted to increase the swap area to allow for hibernation and I responded ‘no’ but I didn’t expect it to be disabled completely (if that’s what Kinfocentre is telling me).

I’m getting out of my depth here. I can increase the swap area with Partitioner if desirable, but how do I make it available again?

2 

% free
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:        8030480     1789916     2376092      271816     3864472     5692280
Swap:      20971516           0    20971516

Note: the “%” is just my shell prompt (using “csh”). The command is “free”.

That shows how much swap is available and how much is in use.


% cat /proc/swaps
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/dm-2                               partition       20971516        0      -1

That shows the device used for swap. In this case I am using encrypted swap, which is why it has an odd device name. More typical would be something like “/dev/sda5” for the “Filename” information.

Please provide similar information for your system.

Maybe also provide the output from

sudo fdisk -l
3

Thanks for your reply, and the output of “free” & “fdisk” is shown below. The partitioner shows a 3Gb swap area, but fstab only has entries for the root and /home partitions. Would editing fstab do the trick?

free

          total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available

Mem: 1995292 1263216 139956 184740 592120 384704
Swap: 0 0 0

fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 232.9 GiB, 250059350016 bytes, 488397168 sectors
Disk model: ST3250312AS
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xc8ee8eec

Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type
/dev/sda1 2048 292863 290816 142M 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 292864 63215615 62922752 30G 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 63215616 69513215 6297600 3G 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda4 69513216 488396799 418883584 199.8G 83 Linux

Cheers, David

4

In case anyone else is interested, I managed to convince myself that editing /etc/fstab by inserting a line for the swap area wouldn’t do any damage, at least. So I found the UUID with “blkid” and consulted the man entry for fstab, then added the line:

UUID=<…> none swap defaults 0 0

So far, so good! The Gnome system monitor indicates the swap file has been used and it appears in Kinfocentre, but not on the system monitor “File Systems” tab.

5

I am not a Gnome user (and basicaly do not al sorts of GUI tools to look at those system information), but I guess the tool is right because swap is NOT a file system. Does why show it in a list of file systems?

6

Yes, that was the appropriate change to make. But best to use CODE tags rather than QUOTE tags around that line, when posting.

7

You could try using the YaST “Expert Partitioner”: <https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.expert_partitioner.html&gt;.
This should point you to including the Swap partition into your system.

  • It’ll add a line to your ‘fstab’ which looks something like this: “/dev/disk/by-id/ata-OCZ-VERTEX2_OCZ-HC8068405854W13J-part2 swap swap defaults 0 0”.

Or, more possibly “/dev/disk/by-uuid/” + the UUID of your Swap partition.
BTW, when you’ve finished, you can check the Swap situation as follows:


 > cat /proc/swaps 
Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/sda2                               partition       2098172 0       -1
 >