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 | grep swap

/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 00

lvdisplay will show you the size of your logical volume:

lvdisplay /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

--- Logical volume ---

LV Name /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

VG Name VolGroup00

LV UUID RVIFz3-B8kp-z9KV-JYtG-N997-JOQ6-ETaJaJ

LV Write Access read/write

LV Status available

# open 1
LV Size 512.00 MB

Current LE 24

Segments 1

Allocation inherit

Read ahead sectors 0

Block device 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 -L 768M

Extending logical volume LogVol01 to 768.00 MB

Logical volume LogVol01 successfully resized

swapon /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01

free -m

total used free shared buffers cached

Mem: 375 343 32 0 48 120

-/+ buffers/cache: 174 201

Swap: 767 0 767