[Debian-eeepc-devel] Newbie experience

[Karl O. Pinc]

On 03/06/2008 06:09:33 AM, Ben Armstrong wrote:

> This is likely not clear because unless you're doing hibernate (which
> in my opinion is a frill that most people can do without) you don't
> need swap at all.  Feel free to leave a note in the wiki about this.

What are your thoughts that lead to this conclusion?  Even with
memory mapping into the regular filesystem it seems to me that
there are still cases for swap.  Please correct me if I'm wrong.

As far as executables go, is is not true that the loader is
going to muck with offsets at load time?  I've not thought
about this level of operation in some time, but it seems
to me that _something's_ got to shuffle around it's location
in the virtual address space if both code segments and libraries are
going to fit into the same address space.  (Jump tables
are an alternative, but inefficient.)  As soon as the
loader changes the loaded executable that portion of the
code is no longer eligible for memory mapping.  Surely some
of the modified code is of the "run once" initialization
or "seldom used feature" variety.  This sort of code is
a prime candidate for swapping out and freeing some RAM.

Please enlighten me on the above, it seems like I need
the part of my brain that deals with ld flushed and re-loaded.
(Anyone have a good link?)

Another candidate would be entire applications that are
started and then sit unused for long periods of time.
I tend to have multiple desktop workspaces with different
applications in each.  Some of these sit unused for hours
or days at a time.  Better to use the RAM for running
applications.


Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                  -- Robert A. Heinlein