Memory Allocation policy

Mark E. Drummond (drummond-m@rmc.ca)
Tue, 21 Sep 1999 12:47:12 -0400

An interesting question has been asked on my local LUGs mailing list.
How does the kernel allocate memory? For example, I remember something
about how Solaris allocates memory from swap first but when the memory
is actually used it takes it from RAM. And then there is the whole idea
of putting RAM & swap together as one big pool.

Someone else mentioned that MacOS _always_ tried to allocate space for
the app in swap no matter how much RAM was available. The discussion
stems from the idea of running Linux without any swap, given that many
people have 128+MB of RAM these days.

So how does the Linux kernel do it?

-- 
Mark E Drummond
mdrmmond@kos.net


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