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Date:      Sat, 7 Feb 1998 04:34:09 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To:        dyson@FreeBSD.ORG
Cc:        mike@smith.net.au, abial@nask.pl, tlambert@primenet.com, freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG, jkh@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Custom init(8) (and some ideas)
Message-ID:  <199802070434.VAA25379@usr05.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <199802070350.WAA00681@dyson.iquest.net> from "John S. Dyson" at Feb 6, 98 10:50:01 pm

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> I think that I might have misinformed here.  Gzipped binaries need swap
> backing store for each page in the image even for .text section, when
> physical memory space needs to be freed for another page.  Non-gzipped
> binaries can depend on paging off of the a.out itself.  Also, non-gzipped
> binaries don't have to page out the .text for the initial freeing of the
> .text space.  Gzipped binaries need to page out the .text pages when they
> are individually freed due to pageout daemon activity.  Also, gzipped
> binaries are not demand-loaded, but are loaded at startup.  This guarantees
> that the entire image will have to be supported by either memory or swap
> space.  During normal program execution (normal a.out, ELF, etc),  the
> entire image doesn't have to be initially loaded, and you can get
> by with the size of the image being larger than the size of physical
> memory + swap space (of course, that is a special case need, but it is
> possible to do.)  In the case of a gzipped binary, that isn't true.

What is the compression table flush boundry?  You *could* use the
gzip'ped file as a swap store, *if* you created pages out of the
file on the flush boundry, since you could re-decompress the needed
pages by restarting from that point.

This would require (basically) a gzip-pager.  You would also need
to make an map (probably an RLE 0/1 bitmap) to know how many full
and partial pages each decompressed to, and handle the section
boundries (since they would probably not decompress to even page
boundries).

Heh.  Feels like "SoftRAM".  8-) 8-).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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