On Tue, 2003-06-24 at 02:18, Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote: > On systems without swap kswapd is still running and there seem to be no > way to disable it (at least on 2.4). It might be harmless, but at least it > seems unlogical and it wastes resources. Is it just because so many paths > in the kernel depend on it regardless of whether or not swap is present on > the system, or why? Three points. Yes, it is probably nontrivial to remove it. But, There is more to paging than just paging to swap partitions. Only anonymous data is paged to a swap partition. Actual file-backed data is paged back to the originating file. So there is paging going on even without a swap partition -- all those executable files, libraries, mmaped'ed files, etc. Finally, kswapd does more than just paging. It should perhaps better be called "kfreesomememory"... it prunes caches, etc. All this loveliness is in mm/vmscan.c if curious. Robert Love -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
