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Date:      Tue, 16 Oct 2007 19:42:34 +1000
From:      Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy@optushome.com.au>
To:        William LeFebvre <bill@lefebvre.org>
Cc:        freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Question about 'top' values on memory usage, now threads
Message-ID:  <20071016094234.GM1184@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <471398BB.30405@lefebvre.org>
References:  <008801c80e66$7be49490$0c00a8c0@Artem> <471367F2.7050303@lefebvre.org> <037501c80f3d$69120730$0c00a8c0@Artem> <471398BB.30405@lefebvre.org>

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On 2007-Oct-15 12:43:39 -0400, William LeFebvre <bill@lefebvre.org> wrote:
>Whether there is actual swapping going on or not, processes will still nee=
d=20
>swap space.  There needs to be a backing store for every page that's in=20
>physical memory.

This isn't true for FreeBSD.  You can even totally disable
paging/swapping with the config option "NO_SWAPPING" if you want.

FreeBSD allocates swap space on an "as needed" basis, rather than
pre-allocating swap.  The advantage is that a process can request
virtually unlimited amounts of memory via sbrk(2), mmap(2) or
malloc(3).  The downside is that a process may be killed without
notice when it writes to some previously allocated but unused part
of its address space.  See the archives for the full bikeshed.

--=20
Peter Jeremy

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