FreeBSD Man Pages

swapon(2)

NAME

     swapon, swapoff -- control devices for interleaved paging/swapping

LIBRARY

     Standard C Library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <unistd.h>

     int
     swapon(const char *special);

     int
     swapoff(const char *special);

DESCRIPTION

     The swapon() system call makes the block device special available to the
     system for allocation for paging and swapping.  The names of potentially
     available devices are known to the system and defined at system configu-
     ration time.  The size of the swap area on special is calculated at the
     time the device is first made available for swapping.

     The swapoff() system call disables paging and swapping on the given
     device.  All associated swap metadata are deallocated, and the device is
     made available for other purposes.

RETURN VALUES

     If an error has occurred, a value of -1 is returned and errno is set to
     indicate the error.

ERRORS

     Both swapon() and swapoff() can fail if:

     [ENOTDIR]		A component of the path prefix is not a directory.

     [ENAMETOOLONG]	A component of a pathname exceeded 255 characters, or
			an entire path name exceeded 1023 characters.

     [ENOENT]		The named device does not exist.

     [EACCES]		Search permission is denied for a component of the
			path prefix.

     [ELOOP]		Too many symbolic links were encountered in translat-
			ing the pathname.

     [EPERM]		The caller is not the super-user.

     [EFAULT]		The special argument points outside the process's
			allocated address space.

     Additionally, swapon() can fail for the following reasons:

     [EINVAL]		The system has reached the boot-time limit on the num-
			ber of swap devices, vm.nswapdev.

     [ENOTBLK]		The special argument is not a block device.
     [EIO]		An I/O error occurred while opening the swap device.

     Lastly, swapoff() can fail if:

     [EINVAL]		The system is not currently swapping to special.

     [ENOMEM]		Not enough virtual memory is available to safely dis-
			able paging and swapping to the given device.

SEE ALSO

     config(8), swapon(8), sysctl(8)

HISTORY

     The swapon() system call appeared in 4.0BSD.  The swapoff() system call
     appeared in FreeBSD 5.0.

FreeBSD 5.4			 June 4, 1993			   FreeBSD 5.4

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