[MiNT] memory fragmentation

[Joerg_Westheide@su.maus.de (Jörg Westheide)]

Hi Katherine!

K>huge fragmentation.
K>What can I do to prevent that as little as possible?
Normally shutting down (all) your applications should be enough as the system
combines to free adjacent memory blocks (at least it should ;-) ).
If you use a debug version of MiNT you can have a look at the current memory
map by pressing alt-shift-control-F9. You will then get a list of all memory
pages with their protection level and the id of the programm owning it

K>How do other OS do?
Most current systems use a MMU to provide a virtual address space for each
program. That means that the addresses used by the program are independent
from the physical addresses and the system only has to collect enough
physical memory (which can consist of multiple blocks) and assign it one part
of the programs virtual address space.
There also were(?) some software based attempts to solve the fragmentation
problem but AFAIK they all have a performance problem

Bye

                Joerg