On 2015-03-15 18:13, Michael Havens wrote:

I was wondering why Linux uses a swap partition rather than a swap
file. I mean I would think a swap file would be superior since a
file's size can fluctuate whereas a partition is static.

Historical reasons and performance.  A partition is a contiguous area of disk, while a file can be a widely-scattered area of blocks.  The kernel can also access a partition directly, while accessing a file incurs unavoidable overhead of going through the filesystem kernel code. This overhead is (almost) invisible in modern high-powered systems with many G of RAM and CPUs >= 2 GHz.  When 128M of RAM and 400 MHz of CPU were what was available, people needed to be more concerned about performance.

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