What does hibernate with swap do? And what is ideal setup for this?

Issues & Assistance
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I have not yet installed on the laptop but would like to ask before I do. I've read the arch wiki on zram/swap etc and have some questions which I was unable to find the answer to in the Garuda wiki or searching in the gitlab repo.

  • does choosing this create a swap partition or swap file?
  • will it disable zram and only use on disk swap
  • or will it use zram for normal usage and only use disk swap for hibernate, which would be ideal
2

You do not need to use a swap partition if you don't want to. It may be needed to support certain kinds of hibernation states, but other than that it is often unnecessary if your machine has a decent amount of memory.

If you do choose to set up a swap partition, the default behavior in Garuda is to never use it unless your system is completely out of ram and all zram is already in use and there is no other choice. And then obviously it would be used if you set up your machine to hibernate to disk.

The preference to use zram wherever possible is because it is much faster and avoids unnecessary writes to the disk.

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Thank you but I still would like to know what happens if I choose that option - does it create a swap partition and still setup zram? I'm assuming it does.

I understand how zram works and why its used. Just curious if on a laptop should be also use swap. Also I'm assuming with btrfs a swap file (vs partition) is not recommended? The only use for swap would be for hibernation

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Yes, zram will be set up regardless.

If you wish to enable hibernation on the laptop (as opposed to suspend), I would recommend setting up the swap partition. It certainly does no harm, and you can always absorb it back into another partition down the road if you want to take it back.

Historically folks used to recommend the swap partition be at least the size of how much RAM you have (or even larger, I've seen 1.5x or even 2x recommended), although these days it seems like you can pull off hibernation with a smaller swap partition, see here: Power management/Suspend and hibernate - ArchWiki

If it were me, I would still just make the swap partition the same size as how much RAM you have, but of course it is up to you. :wink:

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