Comments: Authenticated sender is <alaric+abwillms AT sdps DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
From: "Alaric B. Williams" <alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk>
To: grendel AT hoth DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl
Date: Sat, 26 Apr 1997 10:45:23 +0000
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Subject: Re: Usage of directory entries
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CC: Matthias DOT Paul AT post DOT rwth-aachen DOT de, opendos-developer AT delorie DOT com
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On 25 Apr 97 at 14:41, Mark Habersack wrote:

> > A garbage collector is a process that deallocates memory automatically. With
[...]
> mmm... sounds sensible. Do you know of any GC already working somewhere?

Erm... there are zillions! Look on the web for Hans Boehm's GC for C. It's
about as good as GC can get under C. Languages with "real" pointers do better
from it.

> > Well, it would go outside the cache, using direct reads and writes, since
> > there is little benefit in caching it's activities. Therefore, it would need
> > to notify the cache of things being shuffled around. To this end, we could
> > cache blocks with addresses relative to files rather than disk sectors...
> > ie, "this cache block is the 3rd sector of file handle X". So when things
> > shift about, nothing gets lost!

> That needs a great deal of memory to be held in a locked area...

Well, it needs thinking about properly. YMMV and all that.
 
> > Swapfiles should be allocated from a fixed, unmoveable, solid block anyway,
> > IMHO.

> And what about the 'flexible' swapfiles - they out of definition cannot be 
> stored in solid blocks?

In which case, treat them like any other file, just as eligible for
defragmentation.

ABW
--
Alaric B. Williams (alaric AT abwillms DOT demon DOT co DOT uk)

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