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 configuration 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 translating 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 number of swap devices,
                        vm.nswapdev.

     [ENOTBLK]          The special argument is not a block device.

     [EBUSY]            The device specified by special has already been made available for
                        swapping

     [ENXIO]            The major device number of special is out of range (this indicates no
                        device driver exists for the associated hardware).

     [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 disable 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.