> From: Loke, Chetan [mailto:Chetan.Loke@xxxxxxxxxxxx] > Sent: Tuesday, July 05, 2011 10:37 AM > To: Dan Magenheimer; netdev@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > Cc: Konrad Wilk; linux-mm > Subject: RE: [RFC] non-preemptible kernel socket for RAMster > > > In working on a kernel project called RAMster* (where RAM on a > > remote system may be used for clean page cache pages and for swap > > pages), I found I have need for a kernel socket to be used when > > How is RAMster+swap different than NBD's (pending etc?)support for SWAP > over NBD? Hi Chetan -- Thanks for your question. I may be ignorant of details about NBD, but did some quick research using google. If I understand correctly, swap over NBD is still writing to a configured swap disk on the remote machine. RAMster is swapping to *RAM* on the remote machine. The idea is that most machines are very overprovisioned in RAM, and are rarely using all of their RAM, especially when a machine is (mostly) idle. In other words, the "max of the sums" of RAM usage on a group of machines is much lower than the "sum of the max" of RAM usage. So if the network is sufficiently faster than disk for moving a page of data, RAMster provides a significant performance improvement. OR RAMster may allow a significant reduction in the total amount of RAM across a data center. The version of RAMster I am working on now is really a proof-of-concept that works over sockets, using the ocfs2 cluster layer. One can easily envision a future "exo-fabric" which allows one machine to write to the RAM of another machine... for this future hardware, RAMster becomes much more interesting. Thanks, Dan -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href