> i was reading Rik van Riel's paper on the zone-based memory allocator
> (http://www.phys.uu.nl/~riel/zone-alloc.html), and came across this
> sentence:
>
> Because of the fact that most UNIX (and Linux) machines have a
> completely full memory (free memory is wasted memory), it is next
> to impossible to free larger area's and the best we can do is be
> very careful not to hand out those large areas when we only need a
> small one.
>
> that phrase `free memory is wasted memory' got me thinking: could that
> same philosophy be applied to disk space? as it stands now, i have a
> predetermined and always allocated swap partition, plus a certain
> amount of free disk space that's used for absolutely nothing until i
> actually save a file to it. could the MM code interact with the
> filesystem driver in such a way that swapping could be done to free
> blocks anywhere on the disk, rather than only free blocks in the
> specific partition that's marked as swap?
>
> i think it might be cool if a linux installation didn't have to
> configure swap space; swap could just grow (or shrink) according to
> the actual disk space in the system. it might be good to mark certain
> disks as `swappable', so that swap would at least start out on fast
> devices.
you want us to swap the way Windows does?
heh :)
_ _ __ __ _ _ _
| / |/ /_ __/ /_____ | Nuke Skyjumper |
| / / // / '_/ -_) | "Master of the Farce" |
|_ /_/|_/\_,_/_/\_\\__/ _|_ nuke@bayside.net _|
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