Ubuntu To Begin Making Use Of Swapfiles In Place Of SWAP Partitions

Ubuntu is going to begin making use of swapfiles in place of swap partitions on new (non-LVM) based installations.

With swap partitions being less relevant these days with ever increasing memory capacities and reserving a percentage of the RAM's capacity for swap taking an increasing amount of disk storage, Ubuntu is changing their policy around swap.

With Ubuntu 17.04, swapfiles will be created in place of swap partitions. This will be the default for non-LVM based installations. Sizing of the swap file will be to no more than 5% of the free disk space or 2GB, whichever is less.

Great to see this change finally taking place. More details via this blog post by Canonical developer Dimitri John Ledkov. Those wanting to setup their own swap file manually can find the excellent documentation of the Arch Linux Wiki.