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MKSWAP(8) System Administration MKSWAP(8)


mkswap - set up a Linux swap area


mkswap [options] device [size]



The device argument will usually be a disk partition (something like /dev/sdb7) but can also be a file. The Linux kernel does not look at partition IDs, but many installation scripts will assume that partitions of hex type 82 (LINUX_SWAP) are meant to be swap partitions. (Warning: Solaris also uses this type. Be careful not to kill your Solaris partitions.)

The size parameter is superfluous but retained for backwards compatibility. (It specifies the desired size of the swap area in 1024-byte blocks. mkswap will use the entire partition or file if it is omitted. Specifying it is unwise – a typo may destroy your disk.)



The swap header does not touch the first block. A boot loader or disk label can be there, but it is not a recommended setup. The recommended setup is to use a separate partition for a Linux swap area.

mkswap, like many others mkfs-like utils, erases the first partition block to make any previous filesystem invisible.

However, mkswap refuses to erase the first block on a device with a disk label (SUN, BSD, ...).


-c, --check
Check the device (if it is a block device) for bad blocks before creating the swap area. If any bad blocks are found, the count is printed.
-f, --force

Also, without this option, mkswap will refuse to erase the first block on a device with a partition table.

-L, --label label
Specify a label for the device, to allow swapon by label.
-p, --pagesize size
Specify the page size (in bytes) to use. This option is usually unnecessary; mkswap reads the size from the kernel.
-U, --uuid UUID
Specify the UUID to use. The default is to generate a UUID.
-v, --swapversion 1
Specify the swap-space version. (This option is currently pointless, as the old -v 0 option has become obsolete and now only -v 1 is supported. The kernel has not supported v0 swap-space format since 2.5.22 (June 2002). The new version v1 is supported since 2.1.117 (August 1998).)
-h, --help
Display help text and exit.
-V, --version
Display version information and exit.



The maximum number of the pages that is possible to address by swap area header is 4294967295 (UINT_MAX). The remaining space on the swap device is ignored.

Presently, Linux allows 32 swap areas. The areas in use can be seen in the file /proc/swaps

mkswap refuses areas smaller than 10 pages.

If you don't know the page size that your machine uses, you may be able to look it up with "cat /proc/cpuinfo" (or you may not – the contents of this file depend on architecture and kernel version).

To set up a swap file, it is necessary to create that file before initializing it with mkswap, e.g. using a command like

# dd if=/dev/zero of=swapfile bs=1MiB count=$((8*1024))

to create 8GiB swapfile.

Note that a swap file must not contain any holes. Using cp(1) to create the file is not acceptable. Neither is use of fallocate(1) on file systems that support preallocated files, such as XFS or ext4, or on copy-on-write filesystems like btrfs. It is recommended to use dd(1) and /dev/zero in these cases. Please read notes from swapon(8) before adding a swap file to copy-on-write filesystems.


enables libblkid debug output.


fdisk(8), swapon(8)


The mkswap command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
March 2009 util-linux