On Mon, Jul 11, 2005 at 05:43:35AM -0700, Gerhard S. wrote: | > In particular you'll notice the paging code is | > really, really old and hasn't | > been touched significantly in a long time, | | Why is that? Does it work so well that nobody needs to touch it or is it so | fragile that nobody dares to touch it?
These days, CPUs are SO fast compared to disk, that paging performance is pretty much unacceptable no matter how well it works -- plus, there is the fact that memory is cheaper to add than ever before. So this has never been seen as a priority, and is something most users haven't asked for (they just buy more RAM). That said, there is some work planned in this area that will make the old pageout code obsolete; since seek times are still slow, but disk transfer rates are very high these days compared to when the whole wad was designed, the basic idea is to make paging work more like swapping, so a whole process can be brought in/out in just a few I/Os. But no matter what we do, with 2GHz CPUs whenever the box starts paging it will still feel like you drove it off a cliff. :) -- Eric Lowe Solaris Kernel Development Austin, Texas Sun Microsystems. We make the net work. x64155/+1(512)401-1155 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] https://opensolaris.org:444/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
