Resize or remove swap on Debian

The Debian installer comes with a convenient tool to do auto partitioning. But there is one limit. When using the guided LVM + encryption partitioning, there is no easy way to change the size of the swap from the installer.

The solution is to do this operation after the installation is finished. Thanks to LVM this is actually very simple. And it can be done from the running system itself. All the commands bellow suppose default Debian auto partitioning was used. But it shouldn’t be too hard to adapt to different configuration.

In my case, I want to totally delete the swap. When my computer starts to swap it becomes barely usable. First thing to do is to disable the swap.

swapoff -a

Once this is done, the swap partition can be removed.

lvremove /dev/debian-vg/swap_1

There is now some disk space that can be reclaimed. Let’s add it to the existing partition. Two steps are needed. First one is to extend the LVM volume group.

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/debian-vg/root

Then the ext4 partition can be extended.

resize2fs /dev/debian-vg/root

A call to df -h should show that root partition is now bigger.

As the swap partition doesn’t exist anymore, it must be removed from the fstab. Also hibernation won’t be possible anymore. So the initramfs must be updated.

sed -i -e 's/^/# /' /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
sed -i -e 's|\(/dev/mapper/debian--vg-swap_1\)|# \1|' /etc/fstab
update-initramfs -u

The procedure is now over. There is no need to reboot.

Another solution to reduce the usage of swap is to reduce the chances of using the swap. Change /etc/sysctl.conf and put a value between 10 and 1. Then swap will only be used in last resort.

vm.swappiness=10

The whole script:

swapoff -a
lvremove /dev/debian-vg/swap_1
lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/debian-vg/root
resize2fs /dev/debian-vg/root
sed -i -e 's/^/# /' /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume
sed -i -e 's|\(/dev/mapper/debian--vg-swap_1\)|# \1|' /etc/fstab
update-initramfs -u