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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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!