How to Add a Swap Partition on Jetson TX1

Jan 30, 2017

Adding a swap partition to Jetson TX1 running L4T R24.2.1 is pretty straightforward, since swap support (CONFIG_SWAP) is already enabled in the Linux kernel. On my own Jetson TX1 development board, I use a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive as the swap device. Here’s how I configure the Jetson TX1 system to turn on swap automatically at each reboot.

1. Make sure the USB flash drive is partitioned properly. In my case, the USB flash drive appears on the system as /dev/sda and I have only 1 partition (/dev/sda1) on it.
2. Run mkswap to format the partition (/dev/sda1) as swap.
3. Create an entry in /etc/fstab for the swap partition. Note it’s suggested to use UUID, instead of /dev/sda1, to identify the swap partition in /etc/fstab.
4. Reboot the system, and the swap partition should be turned on autamatically. You can verify it with swapon -s.

More specifically here’s how it looks like when I run those commands on Jetson TX1.

Reference: How do I add a swap partition after system installation?