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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!spool.mu.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!bofh.dot!arclight.uoregon.edu!dispatch.news.demon.net!demon!arg1.demon.co.uk From: Andrew Gordon <andrew.gordon@net-tel.co.uk> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: MFS - Why? Date: Thu, 30 May 1996 11:55:38 GMT Lines: 12 Message-ID: <833457338.26209.0@arg1.demon.co.uk> References: <AEn4jRr0u3@qsar.chem.msu.su> <npX7tgO@quack.kfu.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: arg1.demon.co.uk X-NNTP-Posting-Host: arg1.demon.co.uk X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.1-STABLE i386) MIME-Version: 1.0 X-URL: news:npX7tgO@quack.kfu.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii nsayer@quack.kfu.com (Nick Sayer) wrote: >A lot of the time swap space is unused. Why? Because you have to plan >for a maximum case, not an average case. Disk space you set aside for >swap is therefore essentially wasted unless you spend a lot of time >near maximal VM allocation. This is the one thing other OSes that have >VM (win95, macos) have over Unix: they use unused disk space as swap >transparently while Unix must have explicitly allocated swap You can use the vnode driver (see vnconfig(8)) to allow swapping into a regular file. It may not be quite as convenient as some other OSs, but it certainly solves the problem.