Hmm, true. Might be more useful as a swap "file", similar to the kernel patch
that allows using uncached high memory (>64MB or >16MB on some motherboards) as
swap (slram?) Set this "video swap" to a higher swap priority than the HDD
swap. It might need a way to resize dynamically, i.e. shrink when a user fires
up Q3A, and expand when more video memory becomes available. There would be a
swapping delay penalty as data is more from video swap to disk swap, but even
32MB should only take a few seconds to swap out. Might really be useful for
older machines (486s) that have a PCI bus and slow HDDs- just add a nice PCI
32MB video card for better swap performance. Since low-end PCs like that have
memory amounts in the same range as current PCI video cards, this could be a
good thing, even though it sounds like some kind of throwback to the DOS days at
first glance!
On 05-Apr-2000 Gerd Knorr wrote:
> In lists.linux.kernel, you wrote:
>> Enrico:
>>
>> > i've got on RivaTNT (onboard) with 16MB ram and i don't use it all.
>> > so is there a possibility to use it as system ram or as swap ?
>>
>> It would be possible in theory to add it to the free_area structures from
>> which memory gets allocated for general use, by calling __free_page on each
>> MMU page that you'd like to access from within.
>
> [ ... ]
>
> Probably not worth the trouble. Read access to video memory is very slow...
-- http://www.bigfoot.com/~brihall Linux Consultant- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 07 2000 - 21:00:15 EST