From: "Kevin - Your.Org" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: Video memory as swap under FreeBSD Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:54:23 -0500
> > On Oct 12, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Stefan Esser wrote: > > > Vladimir Terziev schrieb: > >> You're right, > >> > >> the swap, typically configured, is much more than the amount of > >> the video memory, but in fact the swap is just a reserv, which > >> ensures continuation of the normal operations on the machine, at > >> times of peak loads. > >> In our days the amount of RAM placed in the servers is so much, > >> that the swap, in fact, is rarely used at all and a very small > >> amount of it (several MB) is used. In that cases having a very > >> fast swap space in the Video RAM, in addition to the disk swap, > >> would be a good solution. > > > > If you have a video card with so much excess memory, that you can > > use it > > for swap, then I wonder whether the video card has not been much too > > expensive ;-) > > > > How about spending $25 for another Gigabyte of RAM (real RAM, not > > SWAP) > > instead? > > > > I'm not commenting on if this is a good idea or not either way, but > at least one vendor of servers that we've been buying from is now > including 128 or 256MB of video ram(not UMA, real video ram) embedded > on the motherboard now. > > I thought it was odd too, until I asked our sales rep. The 8MB ATI > chipset they used to use would have disqualified them from being > "Vista Capable". > > So, whether we want it or not, we're getting at least 128MB of video > memory on our servers now. I'd thought about trying to use it for > something, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. :) It would be a cool hack. it would also be cool technology to have around because to 'swap' to the video ram, you need to have a way to map it to a device. And if you have that, then you have a short delta to many of the pci based battery backed ram disks. I'm sure that writing a small geom driver to cope wouldn't be very hard to do. Warner _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
