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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Member since:2005-07-08
In days when physical ram was a tiny fraction of the 32bit address space, it made perfect sense to use a swap space that could make virtual ram look much bigger than physical and get closer to the address limit. It allowed apps to run that absolutely needed much more store than physical ram provided, I'm thinking of Sparc stations running chip design software for example.
Today it makes far less sense, if the task you are doing are light, it is best to turn it off or minimize it and that also adds more privacy, nothing written to disk but what ever the app itself writes. Since the old BeOS already had a severe memory limit, most BeOS apps were aleady light enough.
Still for large jobs that have undefined limits, it makes sense to turn it on, and any power app that wants to use the entire ram makes it hard for the rest of the system to remain stable so the VM lets the other stuff keep running even if squeezed to the wall.
Anyway, I'm glad that it will be available and that it has an on/off switch!
Member since:
2005-11-11
Why "face it"? My last system had 1 GB of RAM and it worked fine. My RAM is now doubled, yet my apps haven't become more bloated. If anything, GNOME and KDE have only become less bloated over the years as they kept optimizing things. I compiled GCC 4 years ago on an Athlon 1.4 Ghz with only 380 MB RAM, why wouldn't I be able to do that now with a system that has even more RAM? GCC didn't become *that* much bigger.
If my last system with less resources worked fine, and it only had 1 GB of RAM, then why would I suddenly need to have 4 GB of swap now that I have 2 GB of RAM? Couldn't I just think of the extra GB of RAM that I've gained as the swap?
It seems totally illogical to me. One of the points of upgrading one's RAM is to make sure that the system doesn't need as much swap, so why would one need to upgrade the swap as well after having upgraded the RAM?