any swap utilities I can use on fc5

[Phil Meyer]

Paula J. Lindsay wrote:
>    I installed a fc5 machine yesterday and now the doctor says he 
> needs    16gigs of swap space.  Is there a utility that I can use
>    to add swap space without repartitioning and reinstalling the whole 
> os?
>    I tried the mkswap, but was not successful.
>    Many thanks in advance.
>    Paula
>

Many automated tools used to assume swap == 2xRAM

This is not true of any modern UNIX system, including Linux.
Linux does not need any swap at all to run.
Very few applications still force swap to exist before loading (Oracle 
still does I think).

So a system with 8GB RAM does NOT, in all likelihood, need 16GB swap.

In fact, a 32bit UNIX/Linux kernel may be limited to 2GB swap MAX.  If 
you need more, you should lay it out in 2GB chunks.

And further, a Linux system running 32bit kernels will waste anything 
above 3GB RAM.  It takes a special kernel mod to use more, and even then 
its not quite 'native'.

Therefore:

Are you running a 64bit kernel on a system with 8GB or more RAM?
If so, a 16GB swap may indeed be useful in some very marginal 
circumstances, such as many instances of Oracle on the same system.

In most normal circumstances, not.

Good luck!