Previously Alexander Grigoriev <alegr (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> wrote:
Ok, that is plain stupid. They should have read some introductory
text on OS memory management! If MS really does not know ho to do this
properly and implemented it this way, then your are correct, of course.

So in Windows, you cannot use more memory than you have physically
available? Unbelivable! That was the reason pageing was invented in the
first place!

Well, I usually only run single taks in XP (games), so I will probably
not be too much affected. Nut I now understand why a webbrowser run in
paralell can lead to memory exhaustion. Why does MS always have to
ignore technology prooven over decades and do their own inferiour and
botched thing? Does nobody there study first what already exists?
Extremely incompetent or extremely arrogant. Maybe both.

Arno

Arno Wagner wrote:
I've run without swap space on Linux for years now. I think swap is an
idea whose time has passed.

In article <56e8bdF28hg9dU1 (AT) mid (DOT) individual.net>, Arno Wagner wrote:
a 128MB memory machine (more than adequate for normal purposes) and a 256MB
swap file ... you have 256 MB of memory available to processes and OS. Not
384MB as you might expect.

programmers who might be infected with prior art. Sorry, "infested", not
"infected". Well, actually, both.
Maybe that would explain the high hiring rates of programmers - once
a programmer has been exposed to other programmer's work, there's the
possibility of a patent violation and the programmer can't be used again.
Single-shot disposable programmers. Now there's an idea.
--
Aidan Karley
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:44 GMT, but posted later.

In article <tZ6dnenvX-0icJzbnZ2dnUVZ_ozinZ2d (AT) comcast (DOT) com>, TimeOday wrote:
a serious application fault, without fear of overwriting work by any other
process. As far as that goes, the idea is very much alive and well. In
fact, making swap a distinct partition is a very good idea. (It can also
be used for dumping core to in the event of a kernel fault.)
Have you checked that your kernel isn't creating a swap *file*
without you noticing - the Linux virtual memory manager has the ability to
dynamically add swap as either partitions *or* as files in an existing
filesystem. I recall that this used to be the case in the 1.x series of
kernels, but I've not bothered learning the ins and outs in 2.x series.

--
Aidan Karley
Aberdeen, Scotland
Written at Thu, 22 Mar 2007 08:55 GMT, but posted later.

Michael Cecil wrote:

Wrong.

"Arno Wagner" <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote

And you obviously have been talking from your arse again, as usual.

Brainfarct again, babblebot? The howmaniest this week?

Like yourself, babblebot? No wonder that you don't work there.

Previously Aidan Karley <name1_name2 (AT) email (DOT) provider.invalid> wrote:
Under UNIX the kernel dumps to file. Swap is not unsed for that.
No idea why Windows is incapable of producing a dump-file (i you
are right that it is).

But id does not do so it unless you tell it to. And at leats in
Debian nobody has scripted in some hidden ''magic''. Most likely
users would be quite offended if somebody did.

The kernel never did this. It may have activates swap automatically
if started with the right options, but it never created swap space
on its own.

Arno

What would you say of an OS that does randomly kill a process when it needs
to get a VM page when a previous allocation already reported as succeeded?
This is what *ix OSs do in case of overcommit. They allocate virtual memory
vithout caring if there is enough pagefile to support it. This is done to
make fork() succeed. For a forked process pair, all pages become shared and
marked as copy on write. They don't get separate pages in PF alocated yet.
Thus, amount of committed memory may exceed amount of available VM. When
there is no need to actually use PF (no copy on write happened yet), it's
OK. When COW happens, PF page gets allocated. If it was impossible to
allocate PF page, the OS just kills some process. Talk to me about
introductory text on good design.

Regarding Windows, I said max(RAM, PF), not min(RAM, PF).

"Arno Wagner" <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote

When kernel bugcheck occurs, it's not a good idea to go to filesystem and
create a file. After all, your filesystem driver may be screwed all over by
a faulty driver that caused the crash. If you call it, it might as well say
goodbye to the whole partition.

In Windows, crash dump is written by a special part of the disk driver,
which is normally not even mapped to kernel space, to avoid its corruption.
Position to where to write the dump is known beforehand, during pagefile
initialization. When crash dump starts, bugcheck handler maps the dump
writer which then does the job.

"Arno Wagner" <me (AT) privacy (DOT) net> wrote

Alexander Grigoriev wrote:
Kernel dumps are certainly something I'm willing to sacrifice. I have
no use for them.