In any case, from that man page, I don't see how you can do both
of "quiet all disk activity" and avoid the problem I mention above
(which really isn't specific to your process; modern OSs have a
lot of processes that can fire at any time to handle the
exigencies of the moment; they need to be able to run, or the
system crumbles).
Right. I'll never quiet *all* disk activity; all I can hope for is
to minimize it somehow.
You could, as mentioned earlier in this thread, avoid enabling the
paging daemon. With sufficient memory, you could run a full
system, but things may start failing in strange ways without the
elasticity provided by a backing store. In case you haven't
looked in depth at the Mac OS X VM system, it's all handled by the
paging daemon. There is no path to disk (for this purpose) within
the kernel.
Right (and thanks John and Graham for the info there). I'd
considered messing about with dynamic_pager but wouldn't like to
modify the boot args nor kill it outright for very obvious reasons.
I need to look into the workings of the paging daemon some more ...
