🚀 go-pugleaf

guy@Auspex.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>>(in fact, SunOS 3.5 didn't swap the kernel
>Neither does SunOS 4.x....

By "swap", do you mean any sort of paging of the kernel itself?  If so,
this is good to hear - it means that I'm not stupid.

Early last year I went to a developers conference to find out how
SCSA drivers had changed for Solaris 2.x.  During one of the sessions
the speaker from Sun had said that loadable drivers could be swapped out.
I was worried about interrupt latency so I asked if there was a way
to pin the driver into memory.  I think the answer was that they would
not get swapped out if they were in use (god I hope, don't want to
swap out the disk driver...).  So then I said, "Oh, so the kernel is
pageable now."  The speaker from Sun said, "Yes, it always has, at least
ever since 4.0."  This suprised the hell out of me because I had never
heard that the kernel was paged in 4.x (the only UNIX I knew of at the
time with a pageable kernel was AIX 3.1), but everone started looking at me
like I was some kind of idiot.  Apparently I was the only one who didn't
know the kernel was paged.  I figured if I was the only one in a room
of 150 who thought the kernel was pinned in memory, I must be wrong.


-Jonathan		hue@island.COM