On 6/7/07, Erik Mouw <mouw@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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On Thu, Jun 07, 2007 at 04:45:25PM +0200, Devvrat Tripathi wrote:
> On 6/7/07, Prasad Joshi <prasadjoshi124@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >On Linux or any UNIX platform process with PID 1 is init process and
> >process with PID 0 is a swapper process.
>
> Yes, i got it but i still cant understand what work does it do. Why is it
> initiating so many DMA transfers.
Is it really that hard? The name gives it away: the swapper swaps.
This is what this site( http://tldp.org/LDP/khg/HyperNews/get/memory/linuxmm.html) says about swapper task
¨ Only task[0] (the idle task, sometimes called the swapper task for historical reasons, even though it has nothing to do with swapping in the Linux implementation¨
so yes it is hard coz the name doesnt gives it away, instead the name just confuses you even more. Besides you dont even need the reference which i gave to tell it is not used for swapping because when i said it was initiating a lot of IO transfers i virtually confirmed that it cant be swapping out. You dont swap out so frequently after all.
moreover it is the kswapd daemon which i responsible for swapping out i guess. So the question still remains. what does the swapper acually do?
