Is Linux Swap really needed? Accidentally Deleted

Question

My DELL laptop has a 500 GB hard-disk. I planned to install dual OS in it, so I re-sized the disk using Gparted and my primary OS is Ubuntu 12.10. While resizing my disk, it displays an error only for primary partition can you partition size. Please find the link for screen shot of my partition details.

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In additionally one partition with 8GB of Linux swap is already i deleted accidentally so the disk is now possibly to re-sized for creating a sda4 for another OS. Now when i boot my primary OS UBUNTU i am facing a small error that "Uaaa-ssdds-------" is missing wait for mounting automatically or S for Skip or M for manually mounting.

How to solve this problem I i need to recreate a Linux Swap.

How much RAM you have ? Read some answers here that might help you to take a decision. As for the 4 primary partitions problem, the solution is here also. — NickTux, Jul 31 '13 at 00:58
For those still looking. You can probably install without swap if you have 4Gb unless you want to do something heavy like video editing or gaming. Though more ram is recommended :). If you installed with swap, stress the system a little and check if you are even using swap with swapon --summary — DerpyNerd, Feb 26 '17 at 22:04

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 12 '14 at 14:58

5

If you have 4GB or more RAM, I would say you most likely don't really need a SWAP partition. If you have less, I would recommend to have one.

In case you want to add it back: Just use gparted, for example, to figure out the UUID and/or your device letter and add back the line in /etc/fstab to mount it.

In case you just want to remove your warning: You can simply remove the line of the swap partion from /etc/fstab, and it won't show up again.

edited Aug 12 '14 at 14:58

imbr

164

answered Jul 31 '13 at 08:00

meskobalazs

2,913

mine in 4GB, how to remove the line or avoid this warning. – Nachiappan R Jul 31 '13 at 18:22
open up /etc/fstab, you will find a similar line: /dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0. Delete this line and save the file. That's it! – meskobalazs Jul 31 '13 at 19:37

rsm · Answer 2 · 2014-08-12T16:38:50.390

In general, your computer does need a memory. But swap partition is special (limited) type of memory. It will help when you run out of physical memory - system will move some blocks of memory to swap partition. But will also slow down system, because

hard disk operations are much slower(!) then RAM and
system will have to move blocks from hard drive to physical memory when they are needed again

In my case I don't use swap partition at all, on any of my Linux systems.

However it's good idea to install some RAM indicator (ie System Load Indicator). When you run out of memory and there is no swap partition, process asking for memory will get an error and in most cases will close. If it happens - you might want to add more RAM or create swap partition.

So, question should be:

Do I have issues related to not enough memory?

If so - I have to add more of it, so:

Is it possible to add physical memory?

If not - create swap partition.

Is Linux Swap really needed? Accidentally Deleted

2 Answers2