Is swap really needed when RAM's aplenty

[Michael Hennebry]

On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, Gregory Hosler wrote:

> If the memory gets fragged and the kernel wants to defrag, e.g. for a memory
> request from an application, in order to defrag any "dirty" data portions (those
> pages that have been written to), the kernel *requires* there to be swap.
> Otherwise there is no place to write the dirty pages out, in order to read them
> in elsewhere.

I didn't realize that memory could get fragged.
I'd thought that one reason for virtual memory
was allowing pages to be renumbered at will,
the kernel's will, of course.

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist:   The glass is half full.
Engineer:   The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."