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7.1: Swapout Overview

swapout is a very simple programs which's sole purpose is to allocate a large chunk of RAM, dirty it by touching the first byte of each page (see `man 2 getpagesize') and finally release the allocated chunk to the system.

swapout originally was written by Kai Harrekilde-Petersen in January 1996. He released it under the term of the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (see Copying)

Simple as swapout is it is nevertheless very useful. ftape -- when used with internal floppy tape drives -- requires large contiguous regions of RAM for DMA transfers. Allocation of such blocks of memory may fail of the system's physical memory is fragmented too much. Allocating a large chunk of RAM and releasing it back to the system causes lots of paging and eventually de-fragmentates the system's memory.

swapout is really ugly. But very useful.


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