On 2007-Oct-15 12:43:39 -0400, William LeFebvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Whether there is actual swapping going on or not, processes will still need >swap space. There needs to be a backing store for every page that's in >physical memory.
This isn't true for FreeBSD. You can even totally disable paging/swapping with the config option "NO_SWAPPING" if you want. FreeBSD allocates swap space on an "as needed" basis, rather than pre-allocating swap. The advantage is that a process can request virtually unlimited amounts of memory via sbrk(2), mmap(2) or malloc(3). The downside is that a process may be killed without notice when it writes to some previously allocated but unused part of its address space. See the archives for the full bikeshed. -- Peter Jeremy
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