[Bug 1767299] Re: Ubuntu 18.04 Installer creates swap partition too small

[dave]

There seems to be a misconception on the part of the devs that allowing
too much swap will result in machines under memory pressure suffering
worse than if they simply ran out of memory and the kernel's OOM killer
rescued the system.  Running out of memory is almost *never* better than
hitting swap.  Depending on the application, it is possible to swap out
vast swaths of system memory to make room for temporary spikes in memory
allocation. It is also customary for the kernel to swap out about 1GB of
memory that will most likely never be accessed again after boot.   This
cannot be done when the max swap is 1GB.  Factor in fast SSD's and
VNME's that come much closer to the performance of RAM, and a system can
remain quite usable even if it should develop a swap storm.  The bottom
line is that this should be a user-tunable in the installer and not
something users have to resort to swapfiles to work around.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1767299

Title:
  Ubuntu 18.04 Installer creates swap partition too small

Status in partman-auto package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  Installed Ubuntu 18.04 final release.

  The disk is 512 Gigabyte, the RAM is 8 Gigabyte. The installer just
  gave me 979 Megabyte of space. I chose LVM to have an encrypted drive.

  Here are some details:

  free -h
                total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
  Mem:           7,7G        4,0G        152M        399M        3,6G        3,0G
  Swap:          979M          0B        979M


  swapon --show
  NAME      TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO
  /dev/dm-2 partition 980M   0B   -2

  
  cat /etc/fstab
  # /etc/fstab: static file system information.
  #
  # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
  # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
  # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
  #
  # <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
  /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-root /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
  # /boot was on /dev/sda2 during installation
  UUID=removed-id /boot           ext4    defaults        0       2
  # /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation
  UUID=removed-id  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
  /dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1 none            swap    sw              0       0

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