Swap Space Management
Swap-Space Use
Swap space is used in various ways by different operating systems, depending on the memory-management algorithms in use. For instance, systems that implement swapping may use swap space to hold an entire process image, including the code and data segments. Paging systems may simply store pages that have been pushed out of main memory. The amount of swap space needed on a system can therefore vary depending on the amount of physical memory, the amount of virtual memory it is backing, and the way in which the virtual memory is used. It can range from a few megabytes of disk space to gigabytes.
Note that it may be safer to overestimate than to underestimate the amount of swap space required, because if a system runs out of swap space it may be forced to abort processes or may crash entirely. Overestimation wastes disk space that could otherwise be used for files, but it does no other harm. Some systems recommend the amount to be set aside for swap space. Solaris, for example, sviggests setting swap space equal to the amount by which virtual memory exceeds pageable physical memory.
Historically, Linux suggests setting swap space to double the amount of physical memory, although most Linux systems now use considerably less swap space. In fact, there is currently much debate in the Linux community about whether to set aside swap space at all! Some operating systems—including Linux—allow the use of multiple swap spaces. These swap spaces are usually put on separate disks so the load placed on the I/O system by paging and swapping can be spread over the system's I/O devices.
Swap-Space Location
A swap space can reside in one of two places: It can be carved out of the normal file system, or it can be in a separate disk partition. If the swap space is simply a large file within the file system, normal file-system routines can be used to create it, name it, and allocate its space. This approach, though easy to implement, is inefficient. Navigating the directory structure and the disk-allocation data structures takes time and (potentially) extra disk accesses.
External fragmentation can greatly increase swapping times by forcing multiple seeks during reading or writing of a process image. We can improve performance by caching the block location information in physical memory and by using special tools to allocate physically contiguous blocks for the swap file, but the cost of traversing the file-system data structures still remains. Alternatively, swap space can be created in a separate raw partition, as no file system or directory structure is placed in this space. Rather, a separate swap-space storage manager is used to allocate and deallocate the blocks from the raw partition. This manager uses algorithms optimized for speed rather than for storage efficiency, because swap space is accessed much more frequently than file systems (when it is used). I
nternal fragmentation may increase, but this trade-off is acceptable because the life of data in the swap space generally is much shorter than that of files in the file system. Swap space is reinitialized at boot time so any fragmentation is short-lived. This approach creates a fixed amount of swap space during disk partitioning. Adding more swap space requires repartitioning the disk (which involves moving the other file-system, partitions or destroying them and restoring them from backup) or adding another swap space elsewhere. Some operating systems are flexible and can swap both in raw partitions and in file-system space. Linux is an example: The policy and. implementation are separate, allowing the machine's administrator to decide which type of swapping to use. The trade-off is between the convenience of allocation and management in the file system and the performance of swapping in raw partitions.
Swap-Space Management: An Example
We can illustrate how swap space is used by following the evolution of swapping and paging in various UNIX systems. The traditional UNIX kernel started with an implementation of swapping that copied entire processes between contiguous disk regions and memory. UNIX later evolved to a combination of swapping and paging as paging hardware became available.
In Solaris 1 (SunOS), the designers changed standard UNIX methods to improve efficiency and reflect technological changes. When a process executes, text-segment pages containing code are brought in from the file system, accessed in main memory, and thrown away if selected for pageout. It is more efficient to reread a page from the file system than to write it to swap space and then reread it from there. Swap space is only used as a backing store for pages of anonymous memory, which includes memory allocated for the stack, heap, and uninitialized data of a process.
More changes were made in later versions of Solaris. The biggest change is that Solaris now allocates swap space only when a page is forced out of physical memory, rather than when the virtual memory page is first created. This scheme gives better performance on modern computers, which have more physical memory than older systems and tend to page less.
Linux is similar to Solaris in that swap space is only used for anonymous memory or for regions of memory shared by several processes. Linux allows one or more swap areas to be established. A swap area may be in either a swap file on a regular file system or a raw swap partition. Each swap area consists of a series of 4-KB page slots, which are used to hold swapped pages.
Associated with each swap area is a swap map—an array of integer counters, each corresponding to a page slot in the swap area. Tf the value of a counter is 0, the corresponding page slot is available. Values greater than 0 indicate that the page slot is occupied by a swapped page. The value of the counter indicates the number of mappings to the swapped page; for example, a value of 3 indicates that the swapped page is mapped to three different processes (which can occur if the swapped page is storing a region of memory shared by three processes). The data structures for swapping on Linux systems are shown in Figure 12.10
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