nathan@mit-eddie.UUCP (04/08/87)
A friend and I were arguing over the following point. I claimed that paging was a specific term used to refer to swapping of 'pages' of virtual memory of a fixed size (onto disk or other). I also claimed that swapping itself is a more general term which can be applied to blocks of virual memory of any size. It can refer to the memory of entire processes being swapped, or can refer to a whatever size segment, or can refer to a fixed size page. (Evidence to support my position is that the following phrases are all used when referring to virtual memory management: 'swapping out a segment', 'swapping out a page', 'swapping out a process', 'swapping out this block'.) My friend claimed that swapping could only be applied to entire processes, and that paging was the only term that could be used for the writing of pages to disk. He did not mean these terms were correct only for some operating system or hardware, but in general. Do any of you have opinions as to whether either of us may be correct? Since I don't think this is really a very interesting question, you should probably reply via mail, and perhaps I'll provide a followup message with the consensus answer. -- Nathan Glasser nathan@mit-eddie.uucp (usenet) fnord nathan@xx.lcs.mit.edu (arpa) "A tribble is the only love that money can buy."