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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