Re: swap cache

Kurt Garloff (garloff@kg1.ping.de)
Thu, 17 Dec 1998 23:35:22 +0100

On Thu, Dec 17, 1998 at 04:09:09PM -0000, Tony Hoyle wrote:
> > Linux supports such easily enough; create a ramdisk, create a swapfile
> > on the ramdisk, and then activate it.
>
> Is it me or is this the most singularly silly idea ever....
>
> RAM runs short, so the system starts swapping bits of itself out to RAM to
> free more RAM up.
>
> err, um ....

There is one case where it makes sense.
itel have deliberately newer P5/Socket5/7 chipsets to support only the
caching of 64MB. Now, if you have more RAM, the access of this memory is
really slow and it slows down overall system performance. Now you could use
the first, cacheable 64MB as normal mem, managed by the kernel and use the
rest as a Ram disk. It's still faster than disks ...

You need a patch for this, look out for slram.

Regards,

-- 
Kurt Garloff <K.Garloff@ping.de>  (Dortmund, FRG)
PGP key on http://student.physik.uni-dortmund.de/homepages/garloff


 There is  something  frustrating  about  the quality  and  speed  of  Linux
 development.  I.e. the quality  is too high  and the speed  is too high, in
 other words,  I  can implement  this XXXX feature,  but I bet  someone else
 has already done it and is just about to release his patch to Linus soon...
    [From a posting of Tigran Aivazian to linux-kernel, XXXX = disk stat]


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