[MPlayer-users] Help! XFree86 4.1.0 crashing when...

[Gábor Lénárt]

On Sun, Oct 14, 2001 at 04:22:37PM -0400, yardbird wrote:
> Il 10:02, domenica 14 ottobre 2001, hai scritto:
> > It's the Question that drives us, Steve Stavropoulos :
> > >  You know what is being said about swap?
> > > "It's better to have it than not to have it!"
> >
> > It depends on are we talking about 2.2.x, <2.4.9, or >2.4.9 :)
> 
> Sorry, this is off-topic, but I am curious. How changed memory/swap 
> management in >2.4.9 kernel?

Yes. A lot :) First 2.4.x kernels have got bugs that VM wastes swap space
and don't free swap pages. The worst case is filling up twice amount of
swap space than your size of RAM inside your box. But that was a broken thing.
Now, -ac kernels and Linus trees use different VMs (Andrea's and Rikel's)
but both of them are better than pervious VM. Also at 2.4.9 (or 10 or 11
I don't remember :) behaviour of page cache was modified. Some people reports
x4 performance with RAID array and so on :)

Also you can always turn swap off even with broken VM (to avoid broken
swap issues :). If you have got enough memory why do you worry? :)
At least you won't be accected by broken swap algorithms.


- Gabor