mkswap, swapon, and swapoff

The mkswap command formats a partition to be used as a swap device. For our disk,

mkswap -c /dev/hda5

-c has the same meaning to check for bad blocks.

Once the partition is formatted, the kernel can be signalled to use that partition as a swap partition with

swapon /dev/hda5

and to stop usage,

swapoff /dev/hda5

You Can have as many of them as you like. You can swapon many different partitions simultaneously.