Messages in this thread |  | | | From | (Linus Torvalds) | | Subject | Re: swap killer kernels | | Date | 30 Mar 1998 17:56:38 GMT |
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In article <19980330170741.14797@dungeon.inka.de>, Andreas Jellinghaus <aj@dungeon.inka.de> wrote: >same problem here : >i have 64 mb, currently no swap partition (used by a dos based game :-). >i never got real problems before with 64mb, but starting with 2.1.91 >compiling (and X, some xterms, several daemons like exim or inn, all >this usual stuff) can kill the system : hard disk is accessed like mad >(don't know what the kernel does), and X gets nearly freezed >(to slow to do anything - Zap keystroke didn't help for minutes, so i > had to use reset).
The 2.1.x kernels almost require a swap area. They should work without one, but as you see they can get rather upset if they don't find one.
Essentially, not having a swap area means that the kernel cannot get rid of the pages it would like to get rid of, so it has to spend more CPU time finding pages that it _doesn't_ like getting rid of in the first place, and those kinds of pages are obviously more important..
Note that this really isn't anything new as of 2.1.x - it's fairly true in 2.0.x too. It just becomes more obvious when the pager is more aggressive.
Linus
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