Solaris™ Operating Environment Boot Camp

Swapping and Paging

To understand swap, we'll look at it in relation to the rest of the memory management mechanism system (i.e., virtual memory and paging). The reason for this is that they are all tied to each other quite tightly.

Solaris uses a virtual memory model that is made up from the total amount of physical memory installed on the system and the amount of swap space that has been defined. For example, if we had 4 GB of physical memory and created a swap area of 10 GB, this would provide us with 14 GB of virtual memory.

Paging

Whenever a program runs it is first allocated an amount of memory. The program code is split into chunks by the kernel; each of these is known as a “page.” The kernel also loads a few of these pages into the memory ...