While I do absolutely adore Arch Linux, it wouldn’t be Arch without running an
upgrade and having a problem crop up out of no where.
This time around, the issue showed up after a reboot when I saw the following
error scroll past before I was presented with the GNOME login screen:
swapon: swapfile has holes
Holes? Like the critically acclaimed kids drama starring America’s sweetheart
Shia LaBeouf?
Not quite.
Turns out whatever had recently been updated had decided that a swapfile that
was created with fallocate was deemed unsuitable for use and thus, has
“holes”.
So what’s the fix? Easy enough, you just need to re-create your swapfile using
dd instead of fallocate:
# Turn off and remove your existing swapfile:
swapoff /swapfile
rm /swapfile
# Make a new swapfile with dd (adjust the count to fit your needs):
dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=32768 status=progress
# Set the right permissions and make it so:
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile
Note: Those commands aren’t Arch specific, they should work on other Linux
distributions as well.
Assuming everything is already setup in your fstab from your hole-filled
swapfile and you used the same name and location, you should be off to the
races.
To double check things, you can run swapon --show which should show your
swapfile listed.
If you happen to use your swapfile for hibernation the way I do, you will need
to tweak a few additional things to get the new offset value for your
swapfile. Fortunately, I’ve already outlined these steps in
another post.
