[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2018-04-25 16:39, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:

> Tim Bradshaw<tfb at tfeb.org>  wrote:
> 
>> Do systems with huge pages page in the move-them-to-disk sense I wonder?
>> I assume they don't in practice because it would be insane but I wonder
>> if the VM system is in theory even willing to try.
> Why not? If there's enough backing store availble?
> 
> Note that many systems demand page-in the code section straight out of the
> executable, so if some of those pages aren't needed, they can just
> be released.  And said pages can be shared among all processes running
> the same executable, for further savings.

Right.

>> Something I never completely understood in the paging vs swapping
>> thing was that I think that systems which could page (well, 4.xBSD in
>> particular) would*also*  swap if pushed.  I think the reason for that was
>> that, if you were really short of memory, swapping freed up the process
>> structure and also the page tables &c for the process, which would still
>> be needed even if all its pages had been evicted.  Is that right?
> It depends upon the system. Some had pageable page tables, which is
> pretty hairy. Others didn't. I don't remember what 4BSD did on the
> Vax, but I suspect that the page tables and enough info to find everything
> on swap stayed in kernel memory.  (Where's Chris Torek when you need
> him?:-)

The pages tables describing the users memory space are themselves 
located in virtual memory on the VAX, so they can be paged out without 
problem. If you refer to an entry in the user page table, and that page 
itself is paged out, you'll get a page fault for the system page table, 
so you'll need to page in that page of the system.
But I seem to remember 4BSD (as well as NetBSD) keep all of the kernel 
in physical memory all the time, and don't page the kernel parts, 
including process page tables.

> But yes, swapping was generally used to free up large amounts of memory
> if under heavy load.

Paging would free up the same amount of memory, if we talk about the 
memory used by the process itself. However, there are various meta data 
in the kernel itself that is needed for a process, which will remain in 
memory even if no pages are in memory. Swapping will also move 
non-essential kernel structures out to disk for the process, in addition 
to the pages. Thus, there is a difference between swapping and paging.
The whole process context for example. Which includes both the page 
tables as well as the kernel mode stack for the process, processor 
registers, and possibly also open file contexts, and probably some other 
things I'm forgetting now.
Very little needs to be kept in memory for a process if you are not 
interested in resuming it on short notice.

   Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol