Thanks for the information. I did sort of know about the suspend to disk advantage. I do have a question. As my reason for using swap files for swap space is to do with having 2GB of RAM and so using the RAM times two rule for swap means 4GB which is more than I think my laptop's HD wants to take permanently (I mean it would restrict the other partitions more than I would want to go). Now I have heard people mention about LVM allowing more dynamic allocation of disk space, how possible are the following and how safe are they: * To expand and shrink volumes with data on (eg. an ext4 partition holding the main system)? * Suspend to disk, does it work if swap is a volume in LVM? * Is there any issues with using swap in a volume? * What is the options for installing grub when using LVM? Remember my preference has been to install it to the partition boot sector. Thanks for any answers. Michael Whapples On 01/-10/-28163 08:59 PM, Jason White wrote: > "Kerry Hoath"<kerry at gotss.net> writes: > > >> There are advantages to having a swap partition. >> Firstly, accessing a partition directly for virtual memory bypasses >> file system overhead. You can just read/write pages to absolute >> sectors on the partition. >> > True, although I have read claims that under modern Linux kernels, it is > no longer the case that swap partitions give higher performance than > swap files. Regrettably I can't remember the details, but I assume that > since space for the swap files is pre-allocated, the kernel now keeps > track of where the sectors are on the device so that it doesn't have to > invoke the file system when writing to the swap space. > > The other advantages mentioned are uncontroversially correct, though, as > far as I know. > > > >