-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I believe (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that dynamic_pager acts like an nfsd process. Upon launch, it immediately makes a syscall and never returns. So it's basically a process wrapper around a kernel thread that never exits the kernel. Hence, I don't think there is much context switch overhead (besides a thread switch within the kernel [stack and registers]). HTH. On Feb 8, 2004, at 5:44 PM, Brian Tabone wrote:

I was digging through the darwin kernel lists, and did some cursory

searches on developer.apple.com, but I didn't find the answer. My

question is , does the kernel turn to dynamic_pager every time it

swaps pages in and out, or does dynamic_pager simply manage the swap

file(s) and grow/shrink them based on usage by the kernel? The reason

I ask is that it would seem a large performance penalty to have to

context switch out to a user-space daemon for every page in/out

request. Not only would you be contesting with page swaps, but you

would further be slowed down by expensive context switching from

kernel to user space.

Thanks in advance,

-Brian T

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Brian Bergstrand <http://www.bergstrand.org/brian/>, AIM: triryche206 PGP Key: <http://www.bergstrand.org/brian/misc/public_key.txt> Objects in calendars are closer than they appear. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQCbIvHnR2Fu2x7aiEQKxpgCg1iMjfe1TFc6giqbWa3/EzRGIzvkAoJkp aFhjw3RL2MrvggcR7ln1181r =dmOw -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ darwin-kernel mailing list | darwin-kernel@lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Archives: http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/darwin-kernel Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.