Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!hp4nl!phigate!philica!adrie
From: adrie@philica.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: Virtual memory or swapping, was Re: SCSI disk drives under MINIX
Message-ID: <701@philica.ica.philips.nl>
Date: 5 Nov 90 12:20:50 GMT
References: <34957@nigel.ee.udel.edu> <1990Oct31.224953.7915@dsuvax.uucp>
Reply-To: adrie@beitel.ica.philips.nl (Adrie Koolen)
Organization: Philips TDS, Innovation Centre Aachen
Lines: 23

In article <1990Oct31.224953.7915@dsuvax.uucp> ghelmer@dsuvax.uucp (Guy Helmer) writes:
>Is anyone with SPARC, 68030, or 80[34]86 chips working on adding
>demand paged virtual memory to MINIX?  Lacking that, has anyone
>successfully put process swapping in?

I considered implementing demanded paging when porting Minix to the
SparcStation. To do it right and as portable as possible, one has to
change the Memory Manager quite a lot. As one of my objectives was
to work on an as straight port as possible, I didn't do it. Andy is
definatively against virtual memory and he has to approve of the
changed MM, I doubt whether it will ever be implemented in an
official Minix release.

>I hate being constrained by physical memory :-(

I feel the same way, also because of the stupid `chmem' stuff and
the waist of memory with programs that might sometimes need a lot
of memory but almost never do (e.g. the GNU C compiler, which needs
a gap of 1200000 to compile itself but needs `only' some 600000 bytes
with normal programs).

Adrie Koolen (adrie@ica.philips.nl)
Philips Innovation Centre Aachen