Subject: virtual consoles, shared text and paging Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1991 19:47:57 PST From: pmacdona@sol.UVic.CA (Peter MacDonald)
Following are the three things required before I would
consider leaving minix:
shared-text
virtual-consoles
9600 serial
Is anyone out there interested or working on these?
I would be willing to take a stab at say virtual
consoles ala Gordon Irlam, if I could get init/login/ttys
from Ari Lemmke first. Comments?
Next I want to babble about something I know nothing about: paging
For those of us with small disks, devoting some of our precious space
for a paging partition is undesirable. Which bring me to ask if we
truly need paging at all. Is it possible/practical/desirable to
try to page executables from the file system? A working set size
could be established and when ram got tight, little used pages
freed for data requirements. Maybe code blocks should only
be loaded on demand?
Perhaps on invocation, a map could be formed indicating where each
block of an executable was on disk. Of course, if the image file
were subsequently deleted, then you have a problem.
Since I am as near illiterate on OS paging system designs as
you can get, feel free to enlighten me.