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SubjectCrazy ramdisk idea
JJKennerly (jkenner@rain.org) wrote:
: laptop users may want to avoid having any swapspace if they have 16MB or more
: and dont plan on doing too many things all at once, for just this reason.
: (the hard drive will spin up at miscelaneous random times... for apparently NO
: reason.)
[...]
: Another approach that MIGHT work but I havent tried is to have 2MB of
: ram disk, and to use it as swap (???) then use plain swap after that. It all
: depends on weather ram disks themselves are swappable (I'd hope not...)

No, but you don't gain anything. You lose the memory you could be using.

Loading apps into a ramdisk ahead of time to avoid touching the harddisk
has the disadvantage of wasting memory also. A ramdisk with filesystem
currently is not resizeable thereby wasting memory on unused apps loaded
into the ramdisk. You may end up using memory TWICE for the text pages of
the same application. A definate loss.

An idea that has occurred to me is a type of filesystem I'll dub ramdiskfs.
In this hypothetical fs, text pages within executables would be shared
with the ramdiskfs pages, thereby getting around the problem of loading
the program into memory twice. I have no idea how practicable this idea
is nor how to implement it at this time. This would be quite a win for
large executables and libraries loaded into ramdisk.


--
William Burrow -- Fredericton Area Network, New Brunswick, Canada
Copyright 1997 William Burrow
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