Re: Memory mystery..

Rik van Riel (H.H.vanRiel@phys.uu.nl)
Thu, 5 Nov 1998 20:27:22 +0100 (CET)

On Thu, 5 Nov 1998, Mr. James W. Laferriere wrote:
> On Wed, 4 Nov 1998 ralf@uni-koblenz.de wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 22, 1998 at 12:27:28PM +0200, Jos van de Ven wrote:
> > > I checked it (now). It is indeed not being run successfully. But even
> > > without swap the problem occurs even if there IS enough memory available.
> >
> > The problem you observe is well known in Linux 2.1 and it's a showstopper
> > for diskless systems which don't have a possibility to swap at all.
>
> Hello All, How about using a ram-disk for swap ?
> I am aware that if the power cycles ... But same with disk swap .
> & would have to have good amount of ram for this to work .

Hmm, this might actually work well enough :)
The problem you have been observing has to
do with memory fragmentation, and giving the
kernel some swap will give it some room to
reshuffle things and solve the fragmentation.

Well, it couldn't solve kernel-space and page
table induced fragmentation, but we can't do
that on 'normal' systems either.

The swap-on-ramdisk might be a good idea to use
and recommend until we do a complete MM overhaul
in 2.3.

Rik -- typing slowly because my kbd is dvorak since sun 19:40...
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