Is swap a file system?

[FSoftware Lover]

Is swap itself a file system at all?

[techieMoe]

To the best of my knowledge, no. It's a partition that's used as a random storage area when your computer runs out of physical RAM. Essentially, harddrive-based RAM.

[FSoftware Lover]

Can you introduce a definite (official) reference for knowing that it is not a file system?

[Sam Liu]

well its like he said, but since you format your harddrive to swap format I guess you could call it a "file system" to some extent

though he is right, its not, really.. isnt a file system just another word for partition type? cause a file syste organizes the partition right?

and why dont you wikipedia it?

In the Linux and *BSD operating systems, it is common to use a whole partition of a HDD for swapping. Though it is still possible to use a file for this, it is recommended to use a separate partition, because this excludes chances of file system fragmentation, which would reduce performance. Also, by using a separate swap partition, it can be guaranteed that the swap region is at the fastest location of the disk. On current HDDs this is the beginning. However with the 2.6 Linux kernel swap files are just as fast as swap partitions, this recommendation doesn't apply much to current Linux systems and the flexibility of swap files can outweigh those of partitions. And since modern high capacity hard drives can remap physical sectors you're not even guaranteed that a partition is contiguous, and even if it were, having the swap data near the rest of your data will reduce seek times when swapping was needed, so the performance claims in the earlier paragraphs probably do not apply to modern Linux systems. [citation needed]

[FSoftware Lover]

http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?...+system&gwp=13

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http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Guide_t...stems_and_Swap

: ... Some disks are also used for swap, which supplies a temporary storage space for data in memory, when memory is full. Though "swap" resides on a disk, it is not actually a filesystem.
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