4.2 File System Types

4.2.3 Swapfs

Swap and how it's managed by the OS has changed considerable in Solaris 2. If you have enough memory you can now run without swap space should you so desire. The OS now treats main memory as if it were a backing store. SunOS 4.1.X required that all memory have a physical backing store. So if you set aside less swap than physical memory, you couldn't use all the memory available. This also meant that the swap space was reserved even if the program and data could fit entirely in memory. This is no longer the case under the virtual swap space of SunOS 5.X. To implement this concept the pseudo file system, swapfs was created. Swapfs provides names for anonymous memory pages. Whenever a process executes a file system operation on a page named by swapfs, swapfs gains control of the page. Swapfs can change the name of the page and back it up with physical store, if necessary. Anonymous memory pages appear to the system as if they were backed up by real swap space, though this is not actually the case. As more memory is needed these pages can be moved to available physical swap space by swapfs.

Swapfs uses main memory as if it were swap space. So in effect swap space is expanded to include main memory as well as physical swap space. A certain fraction of main memory is always reserved for the kernel data structures and is not available to swapfs. When releasing swap space swapfs always releases main memory before physical backing swap space.

Under swapfs it's now also possible to remove swap devices and files while the system is running, so long as this swap area is not being used or if the files in this swap area can be moved to another swap area or memory.

All swap partitions, including the primary one, are now mounted through entries in /etc/vfstab, e.g.:

#device device mount FS fsck mount mount
#to mount to fsck point type pass at boot options
/dev/dsk/c0t3d0s1 - - swap - no -

Unix System Administration - 8 AUG 1996

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