04-23-2004
I believe linux will use some space in / for swap if you delete the swap partition but I haven't tried it. Basically swap can be thought of as extra RAM, but on disk. Lets say you have 1 GB of RAM but you are running a database that needs 2 GB of RAM. You can use 1 GB of actual RAM and 1 GB of SWAP. Without going into to much of a discussion on swap space, typically you want to avoid using your swap space because it is a huge performance degradation to your system. Think of how fast RAM is compared to disk. If you are basically using a disk in place of RAM your system is going to run much slower.
When you use swap, the memory chunks (called pages) that are not in use are written to disk. When the application needs them again they are read from disk back to RAM and other pages are written to the disk if more RAM space is needed.
I hope that makes sense.
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bcopy(9F) Kernel Functions for Drivers bcopy(9F)
NAME
bcopy - copy data between address locations in the kernel
SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/sunddi.h>
void bcopy(const void *from, void *to, size_t bcount);
INTERFACE LEVEL
Architecture independent level 1 (DDI/DKI).
PARAMETERS
from Source address from which the copy is made.
to Destination address to which copy is made.
bcount The number of bytes moved.
DESCRIPTION
bcopy() copies bcount bytes from one kernel address to another. If the input and output addresses overlap, the command executes, but the
results may not be as expected.
Note that bcopy() should never be used to move data in or out of a user buffer, because it has no provision for handling page faults. The
user address space can be swapped out at any time, and bcopy() always assumes that there will be no paging faults. If bcopy() attempts to
access the user buffer when it is swapped out, the system will panic. It is safe to use bcopy() to move data within kernel space, since
kernel space is never swapped out.
CONTEXT
bcopy() can be called from user or interrupt context.
EXAMPLES
Example 1: Copying data between address locations in the kernel:
An I/O request is made for data stored in a RAM disk. If the I/O operation is a read request, the data is copied from the RAM disk to a
buffer (line 8). If it is a write request, the data is copied from a buffer to the RAM disk (line 15). bcopy() is used since both the RAM
disk and the buffer are part of the kernel address space.
1 #define RAMDNBLK 1000 /* blocks in the RAM disk */
2 #define RAMDBSIZ 512 /* bytes per block */
3 char ramdblks[RAMDNBLK][RAMDBSIZ]; /* blocks forming RAM
/* disk
...
4
5 if (bp->b_flags & B_READ) /* if read request, copy data */
6 /* from RAM disk data block */
7 /* to system buffer */
8 bcopy(&ramdblks[bp->b_blkno][0], bp->b_un.b_addr,
9 bp->b_bcount);
10
11 else /* else write request, */
12 /* copy data from a */
13 /* system buffer to RAM disk */
14 /* data block */
15 bcopy(bp->b_un.b_addr, &ramdblks[bp->b_blkno][0],
16 bp->b_bcount);
SEE ALSO
copyin(9F), copyout(9F)
Writing Device Drivers
WARNINGS
The from and to addresses must be within the kernel space. No range checking is done. If an address outside of the kernel space is
selected, the driver may corrupt the system in an unpredictable way.
SunOS 5.10 4 August 2003 bcopy(9F)