Video memory as swap under FreeBSD

[Zane C.B.]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007 11:54:23 -0500
"Kevin - Your.Org" <kevin at your.org> wrote:

> 
> On Oct 12, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Stefan Esser wrote:
> 
> > Vladimir Terziev schrieb:
> >> 	You're right,
> >>
> >> 	the swap, typically configured, is much more than the
> >> amount of the video memory, but in fact the swap is just a
> >> reserv, which ensures continuation of the normal operations on
> >> the machine, at times of peak loads.
> >> 	In our days the amount of RAM placed in the servers is
> >> so much, that the swap, in fact, is rarely used at all and a
> >> very small amount of it (several MB) is used. In that cases
> >> having a very fast swap space in the Video RAM, in addition to
> >> the disk swap, would be a good solution.
> >
> > If you have a video card with so much excess memory, that you
> > can use it
> > for swap, then I wonder whether the video card has not been much
> > too expensive ;-)
> >
> > How about spending $25 for another Gigabyte of RAM (real RAM,
> > not SWAP)
> > instead?
> >
> 
> I'm not commenting on if this is a good idea or not either way,
> but at least one vendor of servers that we've been buying from is
> now including 128 or 256MB of video ram(not UMA, real video ram)
> embedded on the motherboard now.
> 
> I thought it was odd too, until I asked our sales rep. The 8MB ATI  
> chipset they used to use would have disqualified them from being  
> "Vista Capable".
> 
> So, whether we want it or not, we're getting at least 128MB of
> video memory on our servers now. I'd thought about trying to use it
> for something, but decided it wasn't worth the effort. :)

I still doubt this will become common as I don't see many servers
going in with Vista on it.