Re: Swap disklabel partition location?

On 9/15/21 10:30 AM, Theo de Raadt wrote:
> The kernel will automatically add swap if it is partition b.
> If it is not partition b, it will get added later by fstab
> entries. Almost noone does this.
>
> If you put a filesystem on partition b, I would be surprised
> if something causes you problems later, you are fighting against
> decades of practice.
>
> You can allocate the 'b' storage near the end of your partition,
> rather than in-order with the other filesystems. I suspect
> a series of operations with with 'Resize', 'delete' and allocating new
> space will get you storage near the end. And then yes, you should
> be able to re-allocate it in the future, upon a reboot.
>
> But it is also possible that you'll hit bugs in the disklabel editor,
> since I've never heard of anyone doing this.
>
> Paul Pace <paul@mostlybsd.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello!
>>
>> I am wondering if there is some requirement to have the swap disklabel
>> partition always as partition b? I have a VPS where I might prefer to
>> put swap at the end so when the VPS RAM and storage is increased, I
>> can increase swap size, as needed, but I can't figure out why this
>> might be a bad idea.
>>
>> I have so far only found in the FAQ on Disk Setup:
>>
>>> b: The boot disk's b partition is usually a swap partition.
>>
>> And this isn't clear to me that: when there is a swap partition it
>> must be on b, but if there is no swap partition then b is something
>> else, or if it means that usually the swap partition is put on the b
>> partition but can be on some other partition.
>>
>> Thank you,
>>
>> Paul
>>

Thank you, that is very helpful.

I will choose an appropriate time in the future to experiment with this.