As part of some protracted flailing around while trying to get GNU Radio running on a Raspberry Pi 3, I discovered Raspbian defaults to a 100 MB swap file, rather than a swap partition, and everything I thought I knew about swap management seems inoperative. The key hint came from some notes on gr-gsm
installation.
Tweak the /etc/dphys-swapfile
config file to set CONF_SWAPFACTOR=2
for a 2 GB swap file = twice the size of the Pi’s 1 GB memory.
Start it up:
sudo dphys-swapfile swapoff sudo dphys-swapfile setup sudo dphys-swapfile swapon
And verify it worked:
cat /proc/meminfo MemTotal: 949580 kB MemFree: 194560 kB MemAvailable: 594460 kB Buffers: 85684 kB Cached: 377276 kB SwapCached: 0 kB Active: 600332 kB Inactive: 104668 kB Active(anon): 250408 kB Inactive(anon): 20688 kB Active(file): 349924 kB Inactive(file): 83980 kB Unevictable: 0 kB Mlocked: 0 kB SwapTotal: 1918972 kB SwapFree: 1918972 kB Dirty: 40 kB Writeback: 0 kB AnonPages: 242072 kB Mapped: 136072 kB Shmem: 29060 kB Slab: 33992 kB SReclaimable: 22104 kB SUnreclaim: 11888 kB KernelStack: 1728 kB PageTables: 3488 kB NFS_Unstable: 0 kB Bounce: 0 kB WritebackTmp: 0 kB CommitLimit: 2393760 kB Committed_AS: 947048 kB VmallocTotal: 1114112 kB VmallocUsed: 0 kB VmallocChunk: 0 kB CmaTotal: 8192 kB CmaFree: 6796 kB
Then it became possible to continue flailing …