Re: Out Of Memory in v. 2.1

Alan Cox (alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk)
Mon, 5 Oct 1998 03:24:41 +0100 (BST)

> That's one thing I've always wondered about. Why not have the system
> keep track of total memory instead of wanting to mirror memory onto
> swap? It seems to me that if you have 512mb of core and 128mb of
> swap that you've got 640mb of memory and you should be able to do
> allocations against that, since either a page will be in core or
> on the swap device.

Two reasons

1. Some (potentially quite a bit) of the memory is needed for kernel
side resources - page tables, disk cache, kernel image, network
buffers etc

2. Keeping pages both in memory and on swap is good. The swap cache
massively reduces disk reads to memory.

Alan

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