Re: Linux 2.1 wishlist...

Mike Castle (mcastle@umr.edu)
Sat, 15 Jun 1996 12:23:03 -0500 (CDT)

Amazingly enough Stephen C. Tweedie said:
> There IS one area where knowing the underlying device can be genuinely
> useful, though. If we are paging from binaries on an NFS mounted
> partition, then it can be helpful to swap those binaries to a local
> fast disk rather than to keep paging them from the network. This

Actually, I'd like to see this as an option for ALL filesystems,
not just NFS. I'm not convinced that always rereading a page
from the original binary is faster than paging out to a dedicated
swap partition. Less seeks, more potential use of clustering,
etc. I believe OS/2 switched from always paging from binaries to
moving the code to swaparea, and had a performance increase as a
result (someone correct me if I'm wrong). Yes, you suddenly need
more swap space, but I think it would be faster.

mrc

-- 
Mike Castle .-=NEXUS=-.  Life is like a clock:  You can work constantly
  mcastle@cs.umr.edu     and be right all the time, or not work at all
   mcastle@umr.edu       and be right at least twice a day.  -- mrc
    We are all of us living in the shadow of Manhattan.  -- Watchmen