On Sun, Jul 28, 2002 at 03:58:46PM -0400, Samuel R.Baskinger wrote: [Samuel's description is very good, but I figured I'd clear up a few minor points.] > If memory is in particularly high demand and a whole > process has been deemed idle, that whole process may be swapped out of > the RAM and onto the virtual memory (again, the swap partition). Linux doesn't perform the old-style "swapping" of moving entire processes to swap space; it only performs paging. It is probably possible for all of a process's pages to be swapped out but the process would have to be very idle indeed. > So what of all this can you use? Well, most computer do not wipe or > protect the swap partition by zeroing pages on it. This means that *if* > a file was swapped or paged out of memory and into virtual memory, then > it *might* still be there. Files are swapped to a swap partition only for memory-based filesystems that can use swap as a backing store. I think Linux's tmpfs (shmfs) can do this, but files on other filesystems are going to be backed by whatever block device they came from originally. -- "A mouse can be just as dangerous as a bullet or a bomb." -- US Representative Lamar Smith (R-Texas)
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