Understanding the Linux Kernel

Chapter 16. Swapping: Methods for Freeing Memory

The disk caches examined in previous chapters used RAM as an extension of the disk; the goal was to improve system response time and the solution was to reduce the number of disk accesses. In this chapter we introduce an opposite approach called swapping: here the kernel uses some space on disk as an extension of RAM. Swapping is transparent to the programmer: once the swapping areas have been properly installed and activated, the processes may run under the assumption that they have all the physical memory available that they can address, never knowing that some of their pages are stored away and retrieved again as needed.

Disk caches enhance system performance at the expense of free RAM, while swapping extends the amount of addressable memory at the expense of access speed. Thus, disk caches are "good" and desirable, while swapping should be regarded as some sort of last resort to be used whenever the amount of free RAM becomes too scarce.

We'll start in Section 16.1 by defining swapping. Then we'll describe in Section 16.2 the main data structures introduced by Linux to implement it. We discuss the swap cache and the low-level functions that transfer pages between RAM and swap areas and vice versa. The two crucial sections are: Section 16.5, where we describe the procedure used to select a page to be swapped out to disk, and Section 16.6, where we explain how a page stored in a swap area is read back into RAM when the need occurs. ...