Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!cica!ctrsol!ginosko!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Memory utilization & inter-process contention
Message-ID: <2389@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 28 Aug 89 18:58:14 GMT
References: <3332@blake.acs.washington.edu> <261500008@S34.Prime.COM> <249@gp.govt.nz>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 20

>I must be lucky then.  VMS has had one since day one.  Working set 
>parameters can be set by either authorization information, as parameters 
>to the $CREPRC system service (which creates a process) or explicitly 
>during process execution (SET WORKING_SET command, or $ADJWSL system 
>service).

OK, so which of the OSes that support working set scheduling do so
without having to be told by some external agent what the working set of
a process at some given time is?  (Do the VMS calls even tell the OS
that, or do they just tell it how big the working set is?)

Jerry Leichter claimed that the VMS software people showed that a
reference bit is not necessary, given the appropriate algorithms; does
VMS how have appropriate algorithms to determine the contents of the
working set without requiring a reference bit, or did the designers
decide that the appropriate algorithm is to believe what the user or the
application tells you and not try to figure it out for yourself?  (Not a
rhetorical question - I'm willing to accept that the latter is the
appropriate algorithm, given sufficient evidence to demonstrate that
claim.)