From: James L. Paul (james@netcom.com)
Date: 05/29/92 

From: james@netcom.com (James L. Paul)
Subject: Re: Linux swapping
Date: 29 May 1992 15:05:25 GMT

In article <9spkbss6@cck.coventry.ac.uk> csg203@cch.coventry.ac.uk (Bluebeard) writes:
>
>I have 2megs of memory and 4megs of swap.
>
>Does this give me a total of 6megs or only 4 ?
>
>A unix expert, told me that the actual memory maps onto the swap, so only the
>swap space above the system memory is available.
>Is this true on linux ?
>
>I'm considering upgrading to 4meg of RAM, but as I've only got a 40meg
>partition, I wasn't intending to increase the swap space.
>
>
>Thanks for any info on the above.
>

As another Linux beginner, I'd like to hear the answer to this too.
My question is, does Linux swap or page? The use of the term swap is
prevalent in Linux (ie, swap space, swapon) but I also saw descriptions
of swap space given in pages?

Most modern unixes page, not swap. Is linux among them?

BTW, My understanding is this: Swapping involves management at the
process level, and each active process must be fully in physical ram.
This limits efficiency, since memory available to be swapped out is
limited to that of inactive processes. Paging happens at a lower
level, and makes it possible (although slower) to keep only part of
an active process in physical ram. Since paging requires memory
management hardware to be effective, and Linux needs the 386 for
this, I'm guessing that Linux uses paging, not swapping. Do I have
this right? (And is demand paging different from paging? How?) 

-- 
James L. Paul

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