How to add a swap drive to your system

How to add a swap drive to your system, in this case I did this for a virtual machine (qemu) running Arch Linux.

See at the bottom for information about the virtual drive for qemu.

List current available to system disks:

sudo blkid

List all disks:

sudo lsblk

Format as swap:

sudo mkswap /dev/vdb

gives back the UUID

Now the new swap disk will be shown when executing this again:

sudo blkid

(also give the UUID)

Take the UUID from above and add an entry in /etc/fstab like this:

echo "UUID=56445300-90f5-40b4-860b-99037d0e8aad none swap sw 0 0" |sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Actiate available swap disks, ie. from fstab or on GPT volume.

sudo swapon -a

Check the swap is available now:

sudo swapon --show

The qemu image I created as “raw”, VirtIO and set the cache mode to “writeback”, this should be fine for swap while being fast too. See explanation here and here.

I also looked at this information about how to add a swap disk.

As always, give me your feedback, I will add information that can help in the future.