You weren't paying enough attention. He has an old ISA memory card
that he wants to use, and he wants to use the memory on it for
swapping instead of just adding it to his system's main memory pool.
This is entirely reasonable, since memory on the ISA bus can't really
keep up with a slow 286, much less a 386. As he said, using the
ISA-bus memory as normal RAM will actually slow his sysytem down
substantially. Using the slower RAM as swap size really is the best
thing for him to do, performance-wise. Less frequently used pages
will migrate to the slower memory, but can still be swapped back into
faster RAM without having to wait for a disk to seek to the right
block. It sounds odd to use a RAM disk as swap space, but it's not
always unreasonable when dealing with quirky hardware.
Scott
-- Scott A. Laird | "But this goes to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615" scott@laird.com | - Nigel on his new 64-bit computer