Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4344 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Friday 29 July 2005 8:51 pm, Greg Wallace wrote:
> Ok, I follow you now.  If the last process accessing the "text section of
> a program" ... "instructions (and some initialized read-only data, such
> as strings)" closes and then you re-start the program, is that part of
> the program still in RAM, or would it have to be loaded from swap or from
> the file?
The text section is never copied over to backing store (swap). The load 
process simply "maps" that section in from where it resides. 

I don't know the specific algorithm the kernel uses these days for 
persistence, but I would assume that if the pages are still resident in RAM 
that they would be reused. This has been a common technique used in Unix 
systems for years since Unix/Linux commands are generally small 
executables. The same thing applies to libraries. The core libraries, such 
as libc.so are used by daemons, so it should be almost continuously 
resident. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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