From: entropy@world.std.com (The Entropic one) Subject: wow, suggestion for library improvment/shared memory,X suggestion Date: 21 Jan 1993 08:58:57 GMT
I just noticed that the linux munmap call is completely general
purpose. I've started using it on very large pieces of data when
I free them, so that the pages are really freed rather than sitting
around waiting to be swapped out.
It seems like the libraries could be easily changed so that free would
automatically call munmap whenever large chunks of data are freed.
This would greatly improve performance when using large amounts of
data (I wish I had this when I was working on tinymush).
It also seems like using the mmap call and /proc is an ideal way
of doing shared memory since it doesn't require any special code
in the kernel. (maybe this already works?)
If this was done local X windows speed could be greatly improved, the
X windows server could map in all processes using it and transfer
stuff directly from the users memory to the screen. For example
dumping a large Ximage would involve only a copy to the VGA memory
rather than a copy into and out of the kernel.
It seems like linux is fast on its way to becoming the best OS ever
written :-)
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