Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 02 Apr 1999 01:28:44 +1000 | From | Martijn van Oosterhout <> | Subject | Linux's Virtual Memory implementation |
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Sorry for the slightly long post, but I'm really curious:
After looking through "Operating systems: Internals and design principles" by William Stallings, I seem to have come to the conclusion that Linux's virtual memory is very different from other systems.
For example, that book seems to imply that a system's virtual memory size is limited to the total amount of swap space given to the operating system. The stuff in main memory is merely a copy of a subset of the pages in virtual memory.
Linux doesn't work like this. For example, I have a 16M swap < 64M main memory. Pages are only assigned to swap when memory is low.
After talking with my dad about it, he said that this was a very different way to look at virtual memory. Is this true? Is there something new about Linux's way?
As an example, my dad said that under Solaris you can start a program and then remove the disk that the program is on. I'm fairly sure Linux can't do that.
Is there another OS that implements it this way? If not why?
Martijn van Oosterhout Australia
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