Re: [RFC] Arch option to touch newly allocated pages

H. Peter Anvin
2002-03-05T05:34:45Z

Jeff Dike wrote:

> bcrl@redhat.com said:
>
>>From your explanation of things, you only need to do the memsets once
>>at startup of UML where the ram is allocated -> a uml booted with
>>64MB of ram would write into every page of the backing store file
>>before even running the kernel. Doesn't that accomplish the same
>>thing?
>>
>
> Sort of, but it's very heavy-handed. The UML will force memory to be
> allocated on the host long before it will ever be needed, and it may never
> be needed. This patch doesn't waste memory like that.
>

This is not necessarily a bad thing, however. If the user hadn't set up
enough swap, they're probably better off getting the error message early.

-hpa