I found this approach to memory management intriguing because of how much it differed from standard Linux/Windows use of swap and virtual memory The tl;dr is this; The advantage to this approach is obvious, superior system responsiveness at any given time while avoiding core OS out of memory conditions avoiding system instability and also improving the life of solid state storage. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t favor many background processes and puts extra burden on application developers beyond simple garbage collection.
Would you ever want to see a comparable solution on GNU/Linux for mainstream user experience focused distros?
How is that any different then just having a swap partition? OSX doesn't have swap or a swap partition. Virtual memory is automatically granted to applications by the OS and applications basically have to manage their own "swap" memory
Christopher Butler
I'm pretty sure you can use a swap file fine without needing a dedicated partition. Hell, i'm doing this right now on my laptop.
Bentley Fisher
It does sound interesting, I must have been confused I guess.
Jordan Wood
You don't seem to understand. OSX has no swap file nor does it have a swap partition. It just has the entire disk
Owen Gomez
It would be even nicer if the "backing store" was strictly a temp format instead of written to disk, like an autoremove temp file. Not sure if I'm truly understanding the full depth of it's inner workings though.
Henry Clark
That sounds disgusting.
Adrian Fisher
The backing store is temportary. The biggest difference here is that while swap files have a fixed size and location on the disc the backing store doesn't. OSX can get away with this because of how memory management works, the backing store will never be used for active data or dynamic application assets, its purely cache so we don't have to worry about swap slowing down the system
Gavin Ward
does it? Or does it only sound disgusting through the scope of someone used to having to manage swap space because the OS was too dumb to prevent page thrashing?
