Thread: Disabling VM
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Old October 8th, 2001, 01:30 AM
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It's funny - for years now, I've been hearing the MacFaithful wondering "when are we going to get modern memory management?" "It's ridiculous that I have to tell the system how much memory an app should get" and so on... I've been one of that group. It's been a long long wait for things that the Windows/Unix/Linux/etc crowd have had for years and even decades! And now that we have it, a vocal minority wants to turn it off... Amazing. (please note, I'm not picking on you, I've seen similar questions posted elsewhere, and I... just... snapped... )

That said, given the way memory management is done on Unix (and Windows now, too), there is likely NO WAY to turn it off without some serious modifications to the kernel. Memory managers set up the memory address space in such a way that it is not practical yet to fill that space with real memory. For instance, 32-bit system allows for up to 4GB of memory (2^32 = 4294967296). The memory manager sets up a full 4GB of space, and since there isn't nearly as much in actual memory, paging is likely, nay - certain, to occur.
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