OSNews is Exploring the Future of Computing

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 31st Aug 2008 16:15 UTC, submitted by cy

Thanks to Google Summer of Code student Zhao Shuai, Haiku now has support for a swap file. "As of revision 27233 it is enabled by default, using a swap file twice the size of the accessible RAM. The swap file size can be changed (or swap support disabled) via the VirtualMemory preferences. Swap support finally allows building Haiku in Haiku on a box with less than about 800 MB RAM, as long as as the swap file is large enough. [Ingo Weinhold] tested this on a Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz with 256 MB RAM (artificially limited) and a 1.5 GB swap file. Building a standard Haiku image with two jam jobs (jam -j2) took about 34 minutes. This isn't particularly fast, but Haiku is not well optimized yet." The swap implementation borrows heavily from that of FreeBSD.

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RE[2]: Swap twice the RAM

by Rugxulo on Sun 31st Aug 2008 19:27 UTC in reply to "RE: Swap twice the RAM"

Member since:
2007-10-09

Yes, I don't understand why people still stick to it. I have 2 GB of RAM and I have no swap, and everything works fine. It would be insane to allocate 4 GB of swap for my system.

Face it, modern OSes need to use lots of RAM, esp. for developers who are rebuilding things like GCC, OpenOffice, etc. Not saying that's typical or ideal, but it can be necessary for some things.

However, does anyone here know if using 2 GB RAM + 4 GB swap is even possible?? I mean, would that even work (on Haiku or any other 32-bit OS)?? Wouldn't it be unavailable at the same time anyways, only letting you use approx. 4 GB (or less) at once?

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