Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
If a system needs more swap space because additional memory is added or
the system is heavily loaded, the size of the swap space partition cannot be
increased without reinstalling Solaris 9 and resizing the swap space partition.
However, available space from other file system partitions can be used to add
additional swap space.
Adding Additional Swap Space
The
mkfile(1M)
command can configure additional swap space using avail-
able space from mounted partitions. This command creates a file of a speci-
fied size that internally has the appropriate layout. The
swap(1M)
command
can then be used to add the file to the system swap space.
The
mkfile
command expects at least two command-line arguments. This
first is a number that specifies the size of the file. The size should be followed
by a
k
or
K
for KB,
b
or
B
for blocks, or
m
or
M
for MB to identify the appro-
priate scale for the size. Do
not
place a space between the size and the scale.
If a scale is not specified, the size is assumed to be in bytes. The second
command-line argument is the name of the file. More than one file of the
specified size can be created by listing more than one filename as the com-
mand-line argument, but they must be separated by spaces.
The other command-line arguments are supported. These are
-n
, which
indicates that the disk space should be allocated as needed up to the specified
size (instead of all being allocated when the file is created) and
-v
, which is
the verbose reporting mode (filenames and sizes are listed).
A swap space file (or swap file) can be added to the system swap space using
the
swap -a
command. At a minimum, the name of the file must be specified
as a command-line argument. Be sure to use the full (absolute) pathname for
the file. Keep in mind that swap files do not provide as good performance as
a swap partition.
Understand the procedure and commands used to add swap space.
Administering Swap Space
In addition to being used to add swap space, the
swap
command also supports
the command-line arguments to list swap space (
-l
), to list swap space sta-
tistics (
-s
), and to delete swap files (
-d
).
