Sharing swap space between Windows and Ubuntu

Posted by Leftium on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Leftium
Published on 2011-02-15T18:34:46Z Indexed on 2011/03/18 0:18 UTC
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This Linux Swap Space Mini-HOWTO describes how to share swap space between Windows and Linux. Do these instructions still apply to Ubuntu in 2011? How should I modify the steps for Ubuntu? Is there a better approach to sharing swap space?

Based on the HOWTO, it seems best to create a dedicated NTFS swap partition:

  • Dedicated so the swap file will be contiguous and remain unfragmented.
  • NTFS so both Windows and Ubuntu can read/write to it. (Or is FAT32 better for this purpose?)

Then, configure Ubuntu to prepare the swap space for use by Linux on start up; by Windows on shut down.

I want to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 on my X301 laptop. However, my laptop only has a 64 GB SDD, so I would like to conserve as much disk space as possible.


update: There is an alternate method using a special driver for Windows that let you use a Linux swap partition for temporary storage like a RAM-disk, but it doesn't seem to be as good...

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