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If my only "hard drive" is a smallish SSD, are there any advantages to setting up a swap partition rather than a swap file?

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  • I don't even have a swap on my 80GB SSD as I've 8GB of RAM and do not need hibernation.
    – Lekensteyn
    Jun 23, 2011 at 14:29
  • No swap here. my system is so quick booting I do not touch suspend and hibernation.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 23, 2011 at 16:15

1 Answer 1

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It makes no difference either way.

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    That's wrong. The kernel does support hibernating to a swap file. This works out of the box on some Ubuntu releases, others require manual tuning of the kernel command line in the bootloader configuration. Jun 23, 2011 at 15:08
  • I am pretty sure it has never worked out of the box since it requires manually pointing the resume_offset boot parameter to the location of the file, but I guess that does work if you bother. Answer corrected.
    – psusi
    Jun 23, 2011 at 15:18
  • @psusi I know there is at least one hibernation framework on at least one Ubuntu version where you just issue the hibernate command and it takes care of setting up resume_offset. I don't remember which version that was, possibly 9.04 or 9.10 or 10.04, and I think the framework was uswsusp but I'm not sure. Jun 23, 2011 at 15:24
  • @Gilles uswsusp is something you have to install yourself. Out of the box Ubuntu has always just used the built in kernel implementation.
    – psusi
    Jun 23, 2011 at 15:57
  • @punsi Thank you for your answer. Why would anyone choose a swap partition over a swap file, then, especially for smaller drives? What do you gain? Jun 23, 2011 at 23:20

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