OSDev.org

paging in minix is a work in progress
the current stable release doesn't have it!

For what it's worth...

From OSDI:3rd Edition, Tanenbaum[2006], pg 420, sec 4.7, para 1:

"Memory management in MINIX 3 is simple: paging is not used at all. MINIX 3 memory management as we will discuss it here does not include swapping either. Swapping code is available in the complete source and could be activated to make MINIX 3 work on a system with limited physical memory. In practice, memories are so large now that swapping is rarely needed."

Emphasis mine.

KrnlHckr wrote:

Swapping code is available in the complete source and could be activated to make MINIX 3 work on a system with limited physical memory. In practice, memories are so large now that swapping is rarely needed."

It's true though. I run Ubuntu in 1GB, and I discovered a while ago that my swap partition was corrupted and swapping was off. Never noticed it.


JAL

It's not true.

My work box stays on permanently for several months between reboots, and ends up swapping quite frequently. I've had several kernel panics when I forgot to set up swapspace.

Also, try running Oracle on a server without swapspace and see how long it lasts...

JamesM wrote:Also, try running Oracle on a server without swapspace and see how long it lasts... :twisted:

To run Oracle decently, one needs gigantic memory anyway :).


JAL

It seems, then, that the need for swap (as pointed out by Tanenbaum) is dependent upon the type of system - server or workstation/desktop. Server software such as Oracle can be monsterous pigs, indeed. IIRC, Linux will allocate as much physical RAM as it can and page as needed.

My desktop appears to never have used swap. It's a 2GB Dell laptop. Some of my servers (oracle db boxes, ironically) are swap crazy.

All of this is what makes OS development and research so much fun!

-sean

Oh yeah, forgot the second biggest desktop killer... x.org! It regularly uses masses of RAM and slows my (work) system to a crawl.

That and Firefox combine to make the ultimate machine destroyer!

JamesM wrote:Oh yeah, forgot the second biggest desktop killer... x.org! It regularly uses masses of RAM and slows my (work) system to a crawl.

That and Firefox combine to make the ultimate machine destroyer!

And how sad it is that a OS which we proclaim to be the killer of the bloatware that is Windows falls victim to its own bloated code...

I don't think that's a problem that the OS is entirely to blame for - with both Windows and Linux desktop environments, people want lots of functionality and pretty graphics

Cheers,
Adam

AJ wrote:I don't think that's a problem that the OS is entirely to blame for - with both Windows and Linux desktop environments, people want lots of functionality and pretty graphics

Cheers,
Adam

Oops, too true. Darn those piggy application developers!

JamesM wrote:Oh yeah, forgot the second biggest desktop killer... x.org! It regularly uses masses of RAM and slows my (work) system to a crawl.

That and Firefox combine to make the ultimate machine destroyer!

Xorg barely uses 20M of ram on my main workstation and I've had the system running for nearly a week, personally I think your attacks toward it are unwarranted.

As for Firefox, we're in complete agreement... here's hoping for version 3.0.

As for Firefox, we're in complete agreement... here's hoping for version 3.0.

If RC1 is anything to go by, it's better, but still not ideal. 90 MB at the moment with only GMail and this page open in tabs.

It seems to me though that they added more bugs just for RC1

I use IE7, simply because it opens faster than Firefox. I refuse to keep either open all the time, they both use up too much memory.