title: Does Linux have a page file?
body: <p>I found at several places that Linux uses pages and a paging mechanism but I didn't find anywhere where this file is or how to configure it.</p>
  
  <p>All the information I found is about the Linux swap file / partition. There is a difference between paging and swapping:</p>
  
  <p>Paging moves pages (a small frame which contains a piece of data - usually 4 KB but can vary between different OS's) from main memory to a backbend storage, happens always as a normal function of the operating system.
  Swapping moves an entire process to storage and happens when the system is memory stressed or on windows 8 when a new application is hibernating.</p>
  
  <p>Does Linux uses it's swap file / partition for both cases?
  If so, how could I see how many page are currently paged out? This information is not there in vmstat, free or swapon commands (or that I fail to see it).</p>
  
  <p>Or is there another file used for paging?
  If so, how can I configure it (and watch it's usage)?</p>
  
  <p>Or perhaps Linux does not use paging at all and I was mislead?</p>
  
  <p>I would appreciate if the answers will be specific to red hat enterprise Linux both versions 6 and 7 but also a general answer about all Linux's will be good.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance.</p>