8 Feb
2015
8 Feb
'15
11:42 p.m.
From: Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com>
Once people started to partition them, then all sort
of new things
occurred and I that's when the idea of a dedicated swap partition came
up. I've forgotten if that was a BSDism or UNIX/TS.
Well, vanilla V6 had i) partitioned drives (that was the only way to support
an RP03), and ii) the swap device in the c.c config file. That's all you need
to put swap in its own partition. (One of the other MIT-LCS groups with V6
did that; we didn't, because it was better to swap off the RK, which did
multi-block transfers in a single I/O operation.)
As I recall in V6 and I think V7, the process was
first placed in the
swap image before the exec (or at least space reserved for it).
As best I understand it, the way fork worked in V6 was that if there was not
enough memory for an in-core fork (in which case the entire memory of the
process was just copied), the process was 'swapped out', and the swapped out
image assumed the identity of the child.
But this is kind of confusing, because when I was bringing up V6 under the
Ersatz11 simulator, I had a problem where the swapper (process 0) was trying
to fork (with the child becoming 1 and running /etc/init), and it did the
'swap out' thing. But there was a ton of free memory at that point, so... why
was it doing a swap? Eh, something to investigate sometime...
Noel