Re: VM Vs Swap space

Pratik Solanki
2004-10-07T16:05:39Z

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004 10:37:40 +0100 (BST), Ankit Jain
<ankitjain1580@yahoo.com> wrote:
> well if we dont have a swap area then shall i say my
> system dosent have virtual memory

No.

> is this correct? because i feel even if this swap area
> is not there then also virtual memory concept exists?

Virtual memory is the reason why applications can think they have 4GB
of memory while your physical machine might actually have only 32MB.
You don't need to have swap in order to have virtual memory, although
its very advantageous to have swap with VM.

Virtual memory maps the viurtual pages (from 0 to 4GB) to actually
physical memory pages (from 0 to however much RAM you have). Swapping
is the process of using the disk to store physical memory pages when
they are not in use, and then restoring them when an application
accesses them.