One of the use case for swap space is the hibernate utility. If you haven’t allocated swap space or the space allocated is less than your RAM, your system will not hibernate. To fix this, you need to create a swap space large enough to hold a copy of your RAM. I will tell you in simple steps how to create or increase the size of swap space. This should work in most of the linux systems, but I have tested this on Ubuntu 20.04.
1. Create a new swap space
First of all you need to create a swap file. See the command below which creates a swapfile of size 1GB
sudo fallocate -l 1G /swapfile
You should also set the permission of this file to root user. This is optional, but recommended.
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
2. Increase the size of existing swap space
Turn off all swap processes
sudo swapoff -a
resize the file using command below. In this, /dev/zero is the location of existing swap file. We are changing the size to 8GB as 8 chunks (count=8) of size 1GB each (bs=1G)
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1G count=8
Now, make the newly created swap file or the updated swap file to be usable as swap space
sudo mkswap /swapfile
Activate the swap space
sudo swapon /swapfile
Voila ! It’s done. You can verify this by using this command
sudo swapon --show
If everything was successful, you should see an output like this
ankit@ankit-linux:~$ sudo swapon --show [sudo] password for ankit: NAME TYPE SIZE USED PRIO /swapfile file 8G 13.2M -2