A swap file is an ordinary file; it is in no way special to the kernel. The only thing that matters to the kernel is that it has no holes, and that it is prepared for use with mkswap(8). It must reside on a local disk, however; it can't reside in a filesystem that has been mounted over NFS.
The bit about holes is important. The swap file reserves the disk space so that the kernel can quickly swap out a page without having to go through all the things that are necessary when allocating a disk sector to a file. The kernel merely uses any sectors that have already been allocated to the file. Because a hole in a file means that there are no disk sectors allocated (for that place in the file), it is not good for the kernel to try to use them.
One good way to create the swap file without holes is through the following command:
where /extra-swap is the name of the swap file and the size of is given after the count=. It is best for the size to be a multiple of 4, because the kernel writes out memory pages, which are 4 kilobytes in size. If the size is not a multiple of 4, the last couple of kilobytes may be unused.
A swap partition is also not special in any way. You create it just like any other partition; the only difference is that it is used as a raw partition, that is, it will not contain any filesystem at all. It is a good idea to mark swap partitions as type 82 (Linux swap); this will the make partition listings clearer, even though it is not strictly necessary to the kernel.
After you have created a swap file or a swap partition, you need to write a signature to its beginning; this contains some administrative information and is used by the kernel. The command to do this is mkswap(8), used like this:
Note that the swap space is still not in use yet: it exists, but the kernel does not use it to provide virtual memory.
The Linux memory manager limits the size of each swap area to
127.5 MB. A larger swap space can be created, but only the
first 127.5 MB are actually used. You can, however, use up to
16 swap spaces simultaneously, for a total of almost
2 GB.