Fun with LVM

The OOM killer just killed one my tabs in Chrome. As it turned out I underestimated the size of the swap partition during Fedora installation on my work laptop a few years ago. Or maybe I shouldn’t just let virtual machines idle in the background and open a gazillion of tabs in the browser at the same time. Anyways, I needed more swap space and thankfully this installation sits on an LVM volume group which allowed me to switch to a swap file, remove the swap partition and add the free space to the root volume. Here is how I did that:

I created a new swapfile to use from now on. Six gibibytes should be enough, right?

fallocate -l 6G /swapfile

Creating the swap structure on it and making the system aware of the newly available swap space is easy.

mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

At this point I had two swap locations with plenty of space available. I could have just stopped here, mind you, but where is the fun in that?

I made the new swap file mounted automatically at boot with this line in /etc/fstab

/swapfile  swap  swap  defaults,x-systemd.device-timeout=0 0 0

I also removed the line responsible for the swap partition, then disabled swapping on it:

swapoff /dev/vg/swap

I removed the logical volume. You can use vgdisplay or pvs before and after to see the available free space is indeed got bigger.

lvremove /dev/vg/swap

This is where the magic happens. I extended the root partition to use all the available free space:

lvextend -l +100%FREE /dev/vg/root

And finally resized the ext4 root filesystem to claim the space.

resize2fs /dev/vg/root

The whole procedure took about 5 minutes, everything online and mounted, nice and easy.

Note to self: don’t forget to change the Linux kernel boot command line. In the default Fedora install it contains a reference to the swap partition and the system will not boot if the partition is missing. Edit /etc/default/grub accordingly then update the right grub config:

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg