Re: swap space: an idea. Please comment.

Guilhem Lavaux (ylavaux@pratique.fr)
Sun, 23 Feb 1997 18:43:38 +0100

Riccardo Facchetti wrote:
[snip]
> Imagine you have an application that is asking for memory and all the
> available memory is exhausted. In this case malloc return NULL and your
> application will bomb out (gracefully for itself or with SEGV or something
> like that). In a case like this, the sysadmin will likely not have time to
> add more swap by hand before applications start to bomb out.
>
> Now the idea.
> Why not have an (I called) "adaptive" or if you prefer (I don't :)
> "dynamic" swap file, managed in kernel space, that can grow and shrink
> when memory is needed and/or released by someone ?
>
[snip]
Hmm... I ever saw this sort of program: it is called swapd and when it
notices that free swap space isn't sufficient, it creates a new swap
file of a specific size given at startup.

I think it is located in
ftp://tsx-11.mit.edu/pub/linux/sources/sbin/swapd-1.3.tar.gz

Guilhem.

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