Ideal Swap Partition Size-part 2

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 14:54 -0600, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 11:34 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > On Fri, 2009-01-23 at 08:53 -0600, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> > >  All this avoids the question I asked. VM processing involves paging
> > > between a memory space and an address space. The question is where is
> > > the address space of the process? It can't be the computer's real
> > > memory because that would be the memory space. 
> > 
> > Now you're confusing me. What do you mean by "memory space" and "address
> > space"? Paging involves (among many pther things) moving data between
> > main memory and a backing store. The data belongs to the "address space"
> > of a process, or possibly several processes in the case of shared pages.
> > "Address space" is a logical concept meaning the range of addressable
> > memory locations in the process virtual memory. I've no idea what you
> > mean by "memory space" unless its the physical main memory.
> > 
> > poc
> > 
> One more thing. Let us forget about your using the term address space in
> a reasonable but inappropriate way for my question. What do you think
> the nature of the backing store is and where is it and how is it used?

The backing store nowadays is almost invariably held on a disk, either
as a partition or as a swap file. Some systems may have a solid-state
backing store for reasons of speed. How is it used? It's used to hold
the pages (or segments) of processes which are currently in use, for
some definition of "currently". See any of the lengthy treatises on
memory management. Do you have some specific question?

poc