swap not listed? [solved]

jimp

Yours doesn't show in the widget because the widget is filtering the swapinfo output looking for a device with a number in it and yours is /dev/mirror/swap which I'm not sure how it ended up with that name.

I only have one VM still around with gmirror and it's named /dev/mirror/pfSenseMirrors1b on there, so it shows up because of the 1.

That said, mirroring swap is really a bad idea and I'm not sure why it used to do that. It isn't critical data and that will just cause twice the disk activity for no benefit. Slower and wasteful. A fresh ZFS install with mirroring has a separate swap area on both disks (not mirrored) but maybe if someone went out of their way to do it manually it might end up mirrored. It's an option when setting up the mirror but it defaults to off.

@johnpoz said in swap not listed?:

@mvikman wonder why my fstab is pointing to da1, that would explain why swap not showing on widget I would think.

Probably because the disk is daX. When booted from USB that might affect the order of the disks being detected so the USB drive might be da0 and the mmc is da1 but later after install without the USB drive in, the mmc is da0. Usually it would have used a disk label or disk ID in the fstab but it may not have for one reason or another. The installer has changed a lot over time.

You can fix that easily enough, just edit the fstab and reboot, or you could manually run the commands to setup the swap but it's best to just reboot and let it happen naturally.

mvikman

@jimp
But mine does show on the widget even though it is /dev/mirror/swap

Hmm, maybe I followed some older guide that suggested that the swap should also be mirrored...
Is is possible to remove the mirror from the swap or would it require clean re-install?

jimp

Not sure there is any easy way to break that mirror. Reinstalling is so quick/easy that's probably the most reliable way to do it.

mvikman

Tested with a virtual machine, "/dev/mirror/swap" was created by the 2.6CE installer when selecting "Mirror swap" option
Is it using GEOM Mirror for the swap and ZFS Mirror for the rest of the data?

jimp

@mvikman said in swap not listed?:

Tested with a virtual machine, "/dev/mirror/swap" was created by the 2.6CE installer when selecting "Mirror swap" option
Is it using GEOM Mirror for the swap and ZFS Mirror for the rest of the data?

It must be, since it's showing in /dev/mirror. That's all a part of the BSD installer and not our code though IIRC.

mvikman

What makes mirroring swap a bad idea, other than possible writes to swap are doubled/slower?
Does it really matter if swap is not used at all in normal situations (system has enough RAM not to swap)?

jimp

@mvikman said in swap not listed?:

What makes mirroring swap a bad idea, other than possible writes to swap are doubled/slower?
Does it really matter if swap is not used at all in normal situations (system has enough RAM not to swap)?

Those two reasons are more than enough to not do it. Swap is already slow enough compared to RAM, making it even slower is going to be a problem if/when the system needs to hit swap.

If your system never hits swap it's not going to matter much (until it does...) but there is no advantage to it either.

JonathanLee

@jimp In the case of Squid Proxy and content acceleration I have a 15 gb swap set up it's almost 70 percent full. Is this not the same thing, as it is considered a swap under the proxy ?

johnpoz

Well manually edit of fstab to be da0 vs da1, finally got around to a reboot of pfsense and now see swap

I don't really like rebooting my firewall.. Waited for a time when nobody streaming off plex, and wasn't doing anything else, etc.

I will mark as solved, thanks Jim!

edit: just to be complete, swapinfo now shows

[23.01-RELEASE][admin@sg4860.local.lan]/root: swapinfo
Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
/dev/da0p2        1048576        0  1048576     0%
[23.01-RELEASE][admin@sg4860.local.lan]/root:

jimp

@jonathanlee said in swap not listed? [solved]:

@jimp In the case of Squid Proxy and content acceleration I have a 15 gb swap set up it's almost 70 percent full. Is this not the same thing, as it is considered a swap under the proxy ?

That is unrelated. That is about squid's internal memory vs disk cache. This is about OS RAM usage.

azdeltawye

@johnpoz
I'm having the same issue on my brand new 4100; swap partition exists but is not showing in the widget.

I typed in the command: cat /etc/fstab but not sure where to go from here.

gpart show

I'm not sure why it says freebsd-ufs when the disk widget shows zfs...

Gertjan

@azdeltawye said in swap not listed? [solved]:

I'm having the same issue on my brand new 4100; swap partition exists but is not showing in the widget

See Netgate 4100 disk : my 4100 MAX came with 22.01 pre installed and had a swap partition, but not shown in the GUI dashboard widget.
Had to edit the /etc/fstab/ as mentioned above.

This is mine right now :

[23.01-RELEASE][admin@pfSense.brit-hotel-fumel.net]/root: cat /etc/fstab
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/nvd0p3             none    swap    sw              0       0

NOte ; back then, see other thread, I had a first line :

/dev/msdosfs/EFISYS     /boot/efi       msdosfs rw,noatime,noauto       0       0

Now, it is 't there anymore.

@azdeltawye said in swap not listed? [solved]:

freebsd-ufs when the disk widget shows zfs

Can't tell ...
I did do a complete re install with an fresh "22.05" image from Netgate, last September just to complete my 'crash test formation'.

jimp

The 4100 MAX I have here appears to be OK, it was freshly installed recently with 23.01, though. It's possible there was an issue in the older installer.

I'm curious though if anyone can reproduce that with a fresh 23.01 install.

: cat /etc/fstab
# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/gpt/efiboot0               /boot/efi       msdosfs rw              2       2
/dev/nvd0p3             none    swap    sw              0       0

: swapinfo
Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
/dev/nvd0p3       1048576        0  1048576     0%

: gpart show -p
=>       40  234441568    nvd0  GPT  (112G)
         40     532480  nvd0p1  efi  (260M)
     532520       1024  nvd0p2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
     533544        984          - free -  (492K)
     534528    2097152  nvd0p3  freebsd-swap  (1.0G)
    2631680  231809024  nvd0p4  freebsd-zfs  (111G)
  234440704        904          - free -  (452K)

azdeltawye

@gertjan
Thanks for the link to the applicable thread. I am in the exact same situation.
I will reply there with any updates.

azdeltawye

OK, problem solved.

I did a fresh install of 23.01 on my 4100-MAX and now the SWAP partition is recognized!

Before:

Shell Output - cat /etc/fstab

# Device                Mountpoint      FStype  Options         Dump    Pass#
/dev/msdosfs/EFISYS     /boot/efi       msdosfs rw,noatime,noauto       0       0
/dev/gptid/1fa4f543-c6a2-11ec-93d9-90ec772a1255		none	swap	sw		0	0

Shell Output - gpart show -p

=>        3  234441637    nvd0  GPT  (112G)
          3     409600  nvd0p1  efi  (200M)
     409603  222504511  nvd0p2  freebsd-ufs  (106G)
  222914114   11527521  nvd0p3  freebsd-swap  (5.5G)
  234441635          5          - free -  (2.5K)

After:

Shell Output - cat /etc/fstab

# Device		Mountpoint	FStype	Options		Dump	Pass#
/dev/gpt/efiboot0	/boot/efi	msdosfs	rw		2	2
/dev/nvd0p3		none		swap	sw		0	0

Shell Output - gpart show -p

=>       40  234441568    nvd0  GPT  (112G)
         40     532480  nvd0p1  efi  (260M)
     532520       1024  nvd0p2  freebsd-boot  (512K)
     533544        984          - free -  (492K)
     534528   16777216  nvd0p3  freebsd-swap  (8.0G)
   17311744  217128960  nvd0p4  freebsd-zfs  (104G)
  234440704        904          - free -  (452K)

JonathanLee

@jimp does the 2100-Max have an ability to have a swap partition on the 30GB SSD drive? This is after a fresh install of 23.01 from TAC support provided software.

Screenshot 2023-03-15 at 5.39.22 PM.png

Screenshot 2023-03-15 at 5.40.10 PM.png

Screenshot 2023-03-15 at 5.40.40 PM.png

stephenw10

Not by default. And it would be complex to add it.

The aarch64 installs are created by imaging the target device directly, there is no installer like there is for amd64. The images used there do not have swap.

Steve

jimp

Since you are running from an SSD you could partition the MMC and drop a swap slice on there if you really want swap but I wouldn't recommend doing that long term unless you're just wanting it for crash dumps.

We're considering making it an option to disable swap memory usage while keeping swap for crash dumps but we don't have an option in for that yet.

JonathanLee

@jimp Is there a way to enable swap on the 2100?

The Party of Hell No

@johnpoz When I ran the gpart show -p:

=> 40 234441568 ada0 GPT (112G)
40 409600 ada0p1 efi (200M)
409640 1024 ada0p2 freebsd-boot (512K)
410664 984 - free - (492K)
411648 2097152 ada0p3 freebsd-swap (1.0G)
2508800 231931904 ada0p4 freebsd-zfs (111G)
234440704 904 - free - (452K)my
Swap file is ada0s3,

I went to cat/etc/fstab:
/dev/ada2p3 none swap sw 0 0

So is the point at which I can edit fstab and change the ada2p3 to ada0p3? Then reboot pfsense?