Re: [9fans] cpu server and swap

[Geoff Collyer <geoff@collyer.net>]

cpu servers can indeed swap, just as terminals can.  Only Ken's
original file server kernel won't swap.  Terminals are sometimes
configured to swap into /n/other/swap (in order to run them diskless
or at least real-disk-less).  They can also be configured to swap to
local disk, if present.

It looks like something is wrong; my terminal also has 256MB and I
give 55% to the kernel, primarily for images (it may be overkill, but
I use a lot of windows and hate running out of image memory at
inconvenient times), yet have lots of free memory:

	; cat /dev/swap
	4404/29266 memory 0/99066 swap

I almost never swap, but the first two numbers at least are in units
of the machine's page size (4K on the x86).  So I've got 117,064KB
(114.3MB) of non-kernel memory, of which 17,616KB (17.2MB) is in use.

You can ignore the `167948k swap', but it appears that your kernel is
only seeing about 16MB of RAM, and leaving you with 2387 pages (9548K
bytes) or about 60% of 16MB.  Try `cat /dev/swap' on that machine.  Is
there a `*maxmem=' line in your plan9.ini?  If not, it would seem that
your machine is odd enough that kernel memory sizing is getting
confused.