Hello, I have a question about the functioning of the linux swapper. I am looking at kernel 2.4.26. I am also refering to the o'reilly book "undestanding the linux kernel". >From what I undestand, when the system runs low on physical memory, linux goes through the page table of user processes and swaps out some pages to the swap cache which are then periodically flushed to disk (swap partition) My question is the following: The pages that store the page tables themselves (i.e the pages that store the pgd, pmd and pte), are those pages ever swapped out ? Or is it the case that only pages that contain data, code, stack, heap etc... that are swapped out. The top level swapping function is swap_out(). For each user process swap_out() invokes swap_out_mm() on the memory descriptor mm_struct of the process. swap_out_mm() then calls swap_out_vma() on each memory region of the process. From there some pages of some memory regions are swapped out. So from that I would think that only pages that are part of a process's memory region are swapped out. Since pages that store the page table themselves are not part of any memory region then I would think that those pages are never swapped out. It would be great if someone could confirm that I am right or wrong. Thank You Richard -- Kernelnewbies: Help each other learn about the Linux kernel. Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/kernelnewbies/ FAQ: http://kernelnewbies.org/faq/
