Kernel Definition

Jeff Phillips jjp at necis.UUCP
Fri May 24 00:15:55 AEST 1991


A friend of mine is writing a paper on balanced system approach.  In it he
makes the assertion that "...(the UNIX operating system is) too large to fit 
in system RAM all at once, therefore pieces of the operating system are swapped
between system RAM and disk, thereby generating even more disk I/O requests."

Seven years ago I learned that one of the definitions for kernel is "memory 
resident software".  Is the kernel always memory resident, or do parts of it 
get paged (or swapped) out to the swap partition?  If it does go to the 
swapper, what algorithm is used to determine which kernel subsystem (i/o, 
file, process, or dev.drv's) gets swapped out?
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@@ Jeffrey J. Phillips				UUCP: jjp at necis.nec.com   @@
@@ NEC Technologies, Inc.			PHONE: (508)635-6077	  @@
@@          "UNIX isn't a philosophy, it's a way of life" - anon          @@
@@ CASUAL DISCLAIMER: Opinions are mine - definitely not corporate policy @@
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