SWAPON(8)

NAME
swapon, swapoff - enable/disable devices and files for paging and swapping

SYNOPSIS

swapon [options] [specialfile...]

swapoff [-va] [specialfile...]

DESCRIPTION

swapon is used to specify devices on which paging and swapping are to take place.

The device or file used is given by the specialfile parameter. It may be of the form -L label or -U uuid to indicate a device by label or uuid.

Calls to swapon normally occur in the system boot scripts making all swap devices available, so that the paging and swapping activity is interleaved across several devices and files.

swapoff disables swapping on the specified devices and files. When the -a flag is given, swapping is disabled on all known swap devices and files (as found in /proc/swaps or /etc/fstab).

OPTIONS

-a, --all
    All devices marked as "swap" in /etc/fstab are made available, except for those with the "noauto" option. Devices that are already being used as swap are silently skipped. See the FSTAB CONFIGURATION section for more details.

-T, --fstab path
    Specifies an alternative fstab file for compatibility with mount(8). If path is a directory, then the files in the directory are sorted by strverscmp(3); files that start with "." or without an .fstab extension are ignored. The option can be specified more than once. This option is mostly designed for initramfs or chroot scripts where additional configuration is specified beyond standard system configuration.

-d, --discard[=policy]
    Enable swap discards, if the swap backing device supports the discard or trim operation. This may improve performance on some Solid State Devices, but often it does not. The option allows one to select between two available swap discard policies:

    --discard=once
        to perform a single-time discard operation for the whole swap area at swapon; or

    --discard=pages
        to asynchronously discard freed swap pages before they are available for reuse.

    If no policy is selected, the default behavior is to enable both discard types. The /etc/fstab mount options discard, discard=once, or discard=pages may also be used to enable discard flags.

-e, --ifexists
    Silently skip devices that do not exist. The /etc/fstab mount option nofail may also be used to skip non-existing device.

-f, --fixpgsz
    Reinitialize (exec mkswap) the swap space if its page size does not match that of the current running kernel. mkswap(8) initializes the whole device and does not check for bad blocks.

-L label
    Use the partition that has the specified label. (For this, access to /proc/partitions is needed.)

-o, --options opts
    Specify swap options by an fstab-compatible comma-separated string. For example:

    swapon -o pri=1,discard=pages,nofail /dev/sda2

    The opts string is evaluated last and overrides all other command line options.

-p, --priority priority
    Specify the priority of the swap device. priority is a value between 0 and 32767. Higher numbers indicate higher priority. See swapon(2) for a full description of swap priorities. Add pri=value to the option field of /etc/fstab for use with swapon -a. When no priority is defined, Linux kernel defaults to negative numbers.

-s, --summary
    Display swap usage summary by device. Equivalent to cat /proc/swaps. This output format is DEPRECATED in favour of --show that provides better control on output data.

--show[=column...]
    Display a definable table of swap areas. See the --help output for a list of available columns.

--output-all
    Output all available columns.

--annotate[=when]
    Adds an annotation to each column header name. Such an annotation can be shown as a tooltip by terminals that support this feature. The optional when argument can be always, never, or auto. If the argument is omitted, it defaults to auto, which means that annotations will only be used when the output goes to a terminal.

--noheadings
    Do not print headings when displaying --show output.

--raw
    Display --show output without aligning table columns.

--bytes
    Display swap size in bytes in --show output instead of in user-friendly units.

-U uuid
    Use the partition that has the specified uuid.

-v, --verbose
    Be verbose.

-h, --help
    Display help text and exit.

-V, --version
    Display version and exit.

FSTAB CONFIGURATION

The command swapon --all reads configuration from /etc/fstab (or from a file specified by the --fstab command line option). Only fstab entries with the filesystem type (3rd field) set to "swap" are relevant.

The option --options accepts values in the same form as can be specified in the fourth field in fstab.

  The first field (source)

Specify the swap source. If the source is a regular file, it is addressed by an absolute path.

If the swap is a block device, it can be addressed by device path, swap area tags LABEL= or UUID= (see mkswap(8) for more details), or by partition tags like PARTLABEL= or PARTUUID=.

  The second field (target)

Unused by swapon, the recommended convention is to use "none".

  The third field (type)

Requires "swap" as the filesystem type.

  The fourth field (options)

It is formatted as a comma-separated list of options. All unknown options are silently ignored. If options are unnecessary, the recommended convention is to use "defaults". The options specified in fstab extend or overwrite settings specified on the swapon command line.

Supported swap options:

noauto
    Ignore entry when swapon --all is given.

nofail
    Do not report errors for this device if it does not exist.

discard[=policy]
    Enable swap discard. The supported settings are discard, discard=once, or discard=pages. For more details, see the --discard command line option.

pri=priority
    Specify the priority of the swap device. For more details, see the --priority command line option.

  The fifth field

Unused by swapon, the recommended convention is to keep it empty.

  The sixth field

Unused by swapon, the recommended convention is to keep it empty.

EXIT STATUS

swapoff has the following exit status values since v2.36:

0
    success

2
    system has insufficient memory to stop swapping (OOM)

4
    swapoff(2) syscall failed for another reason

8
    non-swapoff(2) syscall system error (out of memory, ...)

16
    usage or syntax error

32
    all swapoff failed on --all

64
    some swapoff succeeded on --all

The command swapoff --all returns 0 (all succeeded), 32 (all failed), or 64 (some failed, some succeeded).

+ The old versions before v2.36 has no documented exit status, 0 means success in all versions.

ENVIRONMENT

LIBMOUNT_DEBUG=all
    enables libmount debug output.

LIBBLKID_DEBUG=all
    enables libblkid debug output.

FILES

/dev/sd??
    standard paging devices

/etc/fstab
    ascii filesystem description table

NOTES

  Files with holes

The swap file implementation in the kernel expects to be able to write to the file directly, without the assistance of the filesystem. This is a problem on files with holes or on copy-on-write files on filesystems like Btrfs.

Commands like cp(1) or truncate(1) create files with holes. These files will be rejected by swapon.

Preallocated files created by fallocate(1) may be interpreted as files with holes too depending of the filesystem. Preallocated swap files are supported on XFS since Linux 4.18.

The most portable solution to create a swap file is to use dd(1) and /dev/zero.

  Btrfs

Swap files on Btrfs are supported since Linux 5.0 on files with nocow attribute. See the btrfs(5) manual page for more details.

Since version 2.41, the command mkswap --file can create a new swap file with the nocow attribute.

  NFS

Swap over NFS may not work.

  Suspend

swapon automatically detects and rewrites a swap space signature with old software suspend data (e.g., S1SUSPEND, S2SUSPEND, ...). The problem is that if we don’t do it, then we get data corruption the next time an attempt at unsuspending is made.

HISTORY

The swapon command appeared in 4.0BSD.

SEE ALSO

swapoff(2), swapon(2), fstab(5), init(8), fallocate(1), mkswap(8), mount(8), rc(8)

REPORTING BUGS

For bug reports, use the

AVAILABILITY

The swapon command is part of the util-linux package which can be downloaded from