Use case of removing swap devices at runtime [LWN.net]

Use case of removing swap devices at runtime

Posted Feb 25, 2026 13:48 UTC (Wed) by fraetor (subscriber, #161147)
Parent article: Modernizing swapping: virtual swap spaces

What is the use case for needing fast removal of swap spaces?

I'd have naivety thought that swap devices would be pretty much static for the life of a system, with only infrequent sysadmin interventions changing it, and it wouldn't be worth optimising too much for speed here.

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Use case of removing swap devices at runtime

Posted Feb 25, 2026 17:16 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> and it wouldn't be worth optimising too much for speed here.

Once you're using swap, response will be similar to treacle, so I would have thought optimising for speed would be a very definite benefit!

And while swap devices may be static on personal computers, I would have thought cloud computing is more likely to take the attitude "create swap files as required when memory usage rises", rather than pre-emptively allocate it. These things have a cost - why pay it when you don't need to?

Cheers,
Wol