I have a RPI-3 with the ARMv8 Broadcom SoC. I needed to create a swap file because I was running out of memory on occasion. I used a traditional swap file in a separate partition because the dphys-swapfile project goals did not align with my needs and I don't want to risk the race condition when starting it.
The swap file was created and turned on:
$ sudo parted /dev/mmcblk0
GNU Parted 3.2
Using /dev/mmcblk0
(parted) p
Model: SD SU16G (sd/mmc)
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 15.9GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
...
Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 4194kB 70.3MB 66.1MB primary fat16 lba
2 329MB 14.9GB 14.5GB primary ext4
3 14.9GB 15.9GB 1073MB primary linux-swap(v1)
An entry was added to fstab:
$ cat /etc/fstab
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot vfat defaults 0 2
/dev/mmcblk0p2 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
/dev/mmcblk0p3 none swap sw 0 0
swappiness was set to a low number to discourage spills out of main memory:
$ cat /etc/sysctl.conf | grep swap
vm.swappiness = 5
When I check swappiness everything looks OK:
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
5
Finally, I'm familiar with How to set up swap space?. It misses the mark because its in the context of dphys-swapfile.
My question is, does anything else need to be done to use the traditional swap file on a RPI-3? If yes, then what else needs to be done?
The OS is Debian-lite:
$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Raspbian
Description: Raspbian GNU/Linux 8.0 (jessie)
Release: 8.0
Codename: jessie
$ uname -a
Linux raspberrypi 4.4.13-v7+ #894 SMP Mon Jun 13 13:13:27 BST 2016 armv7l GNU/Linux
