Re: [MiNT] virtual memory

[Michael Schwingen <rincewind@discworld.dascon.de>]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2000 at 07:57:03AM +0300, Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> 
> I really couldn't care less about a swap partition (hardware i/o
> already slows everything down - constant hard-disk accesses would
> make my TT completely useless), but proper management of the 20
> MB it already has would be welcome as, currently, a couple of
> huge recursive Make runs are enough to exaust all consecutive
> blocks and require a reboot.

Virtual memory can easily make your 20MB much more useful, even without
constant swapping - the reason is that most programs don't need all the
memory they allocate. Once these pages (eg. unused program routines) are
swapped out, they will not cause any additional harddisk accesses until they
are really used - but until then, the virtual memory which they would
otherwise consume is free for other aplications!

Only if you overuse the memory, so that the normal working set of pages that
are constantly accessed do not fit in physical memory, you get heavy disk
activity (and a slow system).

And BTW, depending on implementation, you can even get the benefits of
virtual memory without a swap file or swap partition: the TEXT segment of
running programs does not need to be swapped out, so you can simply discard
these pages instead of swapping them out, and reload them from the program
file when they are needed.

cu
Michael
-- 
Michael Schwingen, Ahornstrasse 36, 52074 Aachen