swapd
Description
swapd is a dynamic swapping manager for Linux. It provides the system with as much swap space (virtual memory) as is required at a particular time by dynamicly creating swap files. This is more convinient than using fixed swapfiles and/or partitions because they (a) are unused most of the time and are just taking up disk spacec; and (b) provide a limited amount of virtual memory.
This comment from Gabor Z. Papp from 2000 is a good example of swapd can do:
With 128MB memory my server totally freezed 4 times after
3-4 minutes. Just starting some memory hog application, and
its over. With swapd works fine. :)
Copyright and License
Copyright (c) 2000 Neven Lovrić <neven@lovric.net>.
GNU General Public License, version 2
OpenPGP public keys
Neven Lovrićs' 2012-04-11 OpenPGP public key (7777 B191 5933 ACF1 B998 0101 70B9 7690 C7F8 DD31).
Neven Lovrićs' latest OpenPGP public key (must be signed with the 2012-04-11 key).
Download
Original Versions
The official swapd archive is located at ftp://ftp.linux.hr/swapd/.
The latest source code is swapd-0.2.tar.gz (detached OpenPGP signature)
There are no binary packages of the original versions.
Enhanced Versions by the Debian Team
These enhanced versions are maintained by Aigarius Mahinovs <aigarius@debian.org> and the Debian QA Group <packags@qa.debian.org>.
The latest version is 0.2-10.
Binary packages for Alpha, AMD64, ARM, HP/PA, i386, IA-64, m68k, MIPS, MIPSel, PowerPC, S/390, and SPARC are located
Enhanced Further Versions by the Ubuntu Team
The lates version is 0.2-11.
Source code packages | Binary packages
Installation Notes
Compilation
swapd-0.2-11 will not compile with recent kernels unless you remove the following line from swapd.c:
#include <asm/page.h>
Configuration
...
Future Devellopment
Status on May 8, 2012 UTC.
swapd-0.3
This release will mostly just make it work on present-day Linux systems and is half-done, but I have rare Internet connectivity right now, so I can't finish it for a while.
dswapd-1.0 and dswapd-kernel-1.0
This release will rename "swapd - dynamic swapping manager for Linux" to "dswapd - dynamic swapping daemon", according to my decision from 2001.
It will be a complete rewrite of swapd and will use my Memory Allocation Vector (MAV) technology which will do everything automatically and exponentially more efficiently - there will be nothing you need to configure unless you want to use custom dswap directories. Also, it will hook into the kernel for increased performance.
The devellopment of this released has also been stalled by rare Internet connectivity.
Contribute
Statistics
If you have access to a heavy-load system or are rinning memory-hungry simulations, download and run memstat-1.0.tar.bz2 (detached OpenPGP signature). Make sure the system has the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) installed. It will gather memory use statistics at 1-seconds intervals, encrypt them on the 1st of every month at 00:00:00 using my 2012-04-11 OpenPGP public key, and e-mail them to me. If possible, try to annoy some script kiddies to have them DDoS the system so that I can see what that looks like, memory-wise.
Testing
If you're the administrator of a heavy-load system and are willing to test releases of swapd / dswapd, e-mail me. Note that you will, most likely, have to recompile the kernel each time a new version of dswapd-kernel (kernel hooks) is released.
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