From: wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 12:42:27 GMT
willmore@iastate.edu (David Willmore) writes:
>>256 MB.
>
>Last time I checked, I was told 16Meg. Who's right?
Neither, I think. The maximum size of one swap area (swap partition
or swap file) is 16 MB, and there can be up to 7 swap areas, so the
total maximum is 128 MB. (And if I have these numbers wrong, someone
is sure to strangle me. :-)
Given that most motherboards can't handle more than 32 MB of memory,
the maximum virtual memory size would be 160 MB. Enough for most
uses for a single user machine, but hardly state of the art for large
machines. Even workstations can have more.
(If it ever becomes a problem, or if Linus gets interested enough, the
maximum limit of 16 MB can be lifted. It is just that the current
system is good enough for most people and was simple to implement.
That is one reason for the success of Linux: do it simply, and if it
works well, don't complicate it. If it doesn't work perfectly, at
least you have something to build on. Actually, that is a tradition
in Unix as well, known as the 10%/90% rule: first write the 10% of the
code that solves 90% of the problem, and if you're lucky, you don't
have to write the rest of the code at all.)