So I recently (and proudly) hacked into an Ampton Chromebook and was able to install a custom BIOS to install proper Linux on it. After getting lazy with Pure Arch, I decided to install Endeavor because it just works. Then I realized that this little boy only has 32Gb of internal storage, so I decided to go into the live USB, run Gparted, and just delete the swap partition. After a looooong boot, I removed the swap entry in fstab and now everything works fine. My question now is… what could happen next? Could my system fail? Do I need to set up a manual swap file or something? I’m pretty confused right now… Swap gets so much attention that I really don’t know how much I screwed up… Or maybe not… I don’t know… Everything seems fine! I’m not used to do something this drastic and not noticing any catastrophic failure.
Without swap what will happen is your machine will crash when it runs out of RAM.
How much RAM does your chromebook have?
Just 4Gb’s i tryed to force it to crash by opening 10 or 12 chrome tabs with 1080p youtube videos… and spotify… and cura 3d… and telegram… and whatsapp… and everything i had in the dock… And Xfce froze around 3gb’s of ram used… but… tbh is an atom n4020… So i could not identify in a definitive way that the lack of swap was the culprit.
I would add a small swap file(1GB) or enable zram.
I enabled Zram (Not really sure if i did it correctly but htop shows a swp of 3.7gb same as usable ram) and everything seems fine… I tried to crash the system by overloading it and i wasn’t succesfull so i’m going to assume that Zram is just enough.