General :: Using Graphics Card Memory As Swap?
Jun 1, 2011I came across this article, which I found to be very interesting and thought share it with you all.
Graphics CardMemory as swap space or RAM disk.
[URL]
I came across this article, which I found to be very interesting and thought share it with you all.
Graphics CardMemory as swap space or RAM disk.
[URL]
RAM for older machines like I use is fairly cheap these days. But flash memory is just as cheap or cheaper. So I'd like to ask about the feasibility of expanding my system's memory using flash memory. And about whether creating a partition for swap on the flash memory, or whether a swap file on the flash device, is the better way to go.
By flash memory I have in mind mainly USB sticks or what are sometimes called "pen drives." But I do also have CF and SD cards that, with the proper cheap adapter (one of which I already own for adapting CF) could be used to create extra swap space. So, what is the current consensus on the feasibility/advisability of using flash memory for swap? I've read about the limited write cycles of flash being an argument against using it for swap. But recent reading indicates to me that the limited write cycles problem applies mostly to older, smaller-capacity flash memory. Some will come out and say that, for larger-capacity flash memory, the life of the device is likely to exceed the amount of time your current computer will be useful (I think I've seen estimates in the range of 3-4 years life--minimum--for newer, higher-capacity flash memory).
A more persuasive argument I've heard against using flash memory for swap is that access times for these devices can be much slower than SATA, and maybe even IDE, hard drives. That would certainly dictate against using flash memory for swap.
So, how about some input on this issue? Anyone using flash memory for swap? If so, what kind (e.g., usb stick or SD/CF)? Are you using a swap file or a swap partition? How's system performance? Likewise, has anyone had flash-memory-used-as-swap die on them? The consequences would undoubtedly be dire. Also, has anyone measured flash memory access times to confirm or refute claims about slow access times? Are some types of flash memory better/worse than others in terms of access times?
I have a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 motherboard with integrated graphics that shows up on lspci as an ATI Radeon 2100. I also bought a PCI-Express Nvidia graphics card so I could use the VDPAU feature on Linux (plays H.264 in hardware). The BIOS has three settings about which display to initialize first:
Integrated graphics
PCI graphics
PCI-Express graphics (PEG)
I set the BIOS on PEG, but
I cannot get anything, not even a splash screen or POST messages, to emerge from the PCI-Express graphics card. (I'm using a DVI connector; the card also has an HDMI output.)I cannot get the kernel lspci to see the graphics card; the only VGA controller it acknowledges is the integrated one.Running dmidecode acknowledges the existence of an x16 PCI Express slot, and it says
Current usage: Unknown
There is an additional BIOS setting called "Internal Graphics Mode" which is normally set to "Auto" which means it is supposed to prefer a PCI Express VGA card. I set it to "Disabled" which now means I'm getting no output at all. I will soon be learning how to do a BIOS reset!
Other information: The PCI-E card is a MSI N210-MD512H GeForce 210. This is a fanless card. Although there are no fans to see turning, the heat sink on the PCI-E card is definitely getting hot, so the card is getting some sort of power.It gets all its power from the PCI-E slot; there is no external power connector.The BIOS is an AMI Award BIOS.how can I make the PCI Express graphics card visible to Ubuntu?
There are plenty of tools for umounting/mounting/automounting usb flash/pen drives/dongles/hard drives. There's the Device Notifier on kde 4, for example.
But what about other devices like headphones, mice, keyboards, modems, etc? A tool for doing this would be very handy.
When we want to setup a linux system, there is a common a suggestion like set the swap space as twice as big than your physical memory, I want to know why do we need this and how is this suggestion come from?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI run a memory-hungry process (mkcromfs) which consumes more memory than I have physical memory on my latop, so it is paging and swappin and thrashing all the time and loadavg is about 2 (compcache is already in use with usual swap partition as well), but slowly moving forward (Although I afraid it will finally try to allocate >2GB and crash draining 2 days of thrashing).
When I want to use the laptop for something else, I stop the process, start X server, firefox and other programs. The problem is that when I start Firefox the loadavg jumps to 10 and the system becomes almost unresponsive at all (long time to turn on/off caps lock, slow mouse cursor position updates, slow switching from X server to Linux console, slow login).
The stopped mkcromfs still holds a lot of memory (464.8 MiB and slowly falling) and moves it to swap only when more memory is needed for some other program, which results in a great slowdown.
How to tell the Linux to swap out this process entirely (e.g. I'm not intending to resume it in short term), possibly waking from swap other data? Also it will be useful to be able to specify the exact swap device to swap the given process out (for example, mkcromfs's memory is useless in ramzswap).
Update: Now I just write a 400-600M of data from /dev/erandom to tmpfs and it makes mkcromfs to shrink. Is there more proper way?
clarify me with ulimit output and memory limit?
ulimit -a output:
core file size (blocks, -c) unlimited
data seg size (kbytes, -d) 1572864
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I have been trying to enable compiz on my fedora 14, but when i enable the desktop effects the graphics just crashes and fedora freezes. When i type lspci -nnk | grep VGA for the graphics card i get:
I made alot of research on how to get Intel graphics work on Fedora, but couldnt find any solution
Same problem I had with Fedora Core 12 and 13.
I've an 8GB swap (I know, overkill, but I don't have space issues, and I'd rather have too much instead of too less). The problem is that my physical memory fills up, and the system crashes, but swap usage is ALWAYS 0%
Mem: 8060580k total, 5193436k used, 2867144k free, 1013788k buffers
Swap: 8388604k total, 0k used, 8388604k free, 2262112k cached
Setting aside the fact that I can't trace why memory usage goes up to 8GB with just firefox/terminals/pidgin, why isn't my swap EVER used?
Also, if I run
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# top
2301 hugo 20 0 1887m 665m 38m S 19.9 8.5 267:38.63 firefox-bin
1811 root 20 0 166m 67m 10m S 10.8 0.9 128:04.59 X
1973 hugo 20 0 306m 78m 16m S 0.8 1.0 42:30.04 compiz
2024 hugo 20 0 487m 13m 8836 S 0.2 0.2 2:14.73 Terminal
1980 hugo 20 0 333m 7228 5492 S 0.1 0.1 0:54.49 lxpanel
7048 hugo 20 0 15016 1168 820 R 0.1 0.0 0:00.03 top
(The rest are all "0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0")
If add up all of the RES columns, I get <1GB. If I add all the VIRT column, I get about 3GB. Where's the other 2GB being used? This goes up all the way to 8GB, without being able to add up where my memory's going.
I have a Pentium 3 computer with Intel i810 motherboard. It is 866 Mhz, 512Mb SDRAM, 20+160 Gb harddisk which is originally showing 20+137 Gb, 16 Mb inbuilt video memory. I have only three PCI slots and not PCI-express or AGP. I want to install a graphics card to my computer. Please, tell me which graphics card should I buy which will support my computer and also I want to install a graphics card having memory of 128-256 Mb or it can be more also if my pentium 3 supports it. Also, do I need to upgrade my powersupply also to install a graphics card? I want to play games like Vice city, Underground. I am currently using Windows Xp.
View 5 Replies View RelatedHave downloaded ubuntu (because my linux lite died). Very pleased so far with ubuntu, but I can't figure out how to access files or photos from a memory card. Just can't seem to go to anything that even shows its existence.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI used Gparted to resize the swap area, and doing so changed the UUID so now the swap memory is not activated automatically and hibernation is also inactive. i got some info about this in a previous thread, which became inactive, and could not fix the problem.the output of sudo blkid is:Quote:
sudo blkid
/dev/sda1: UUID="8bcd1749-f82d-4d4a-967d-ee8a3583e8e2" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sda5: UUID="e02d4dcf-a064-4e6b-a014-a0d9db55f00f" TYPE="swap"
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I did a standard install of Ubuntu 9.10, then upgraded to 10.04 LTS. Whenever I run htop I get:CPU [~3.8%] Mem [100/244MB] Swp [87/713MB]And free -mMem- total:244 used:214 free:29Swap- total:713 used:86 free:626It seems like I should be using allocating more memory to swap. I should be using more swap, or if this looks normal
B. If so, how do I re allocate more memory to swap?I am new to linux and still trying to figure out a lot of things.
I found out that my CentOS 5.4 linux does not use any swap memory! here is the #top output:
top - 10:02:49 up 27 min, 5 users, load average: 4.22, 3.45, 2.24
Tasks: 173 total, 4 running, 166 sleeping, 0 stopped, 3 zombie
Cpu(s): 71.1%us, 26.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 0.2%id, 0.0%wa, 2.7%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3081388k total, 1729216k used, 1352172k free, 69544k buffers
Swap: 5140760k total, 0k used, 5140760k free, 865316k cached
I wonder why swap memory is not used! I also face auto-restart issue while running few tasks. Does it relate to the swap memory?
uanme -r -> 2.6.18-164.el5
I remember that my i have allocated about 5G for swap memory. However I put it into different partition and far away from root partition due to diskspace partition. Does it matter?
I do not know how to show the swap memory partition or partition map over here.
here is the mount output
/dev/sda2 on / type ext3 (rw)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
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I have a system with 2G of memory and swap memory of 4G.
This is the output from :
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How could they do to the memory cache to be used as much? Because, occasionally, swap is used and note that the system could use the memory cache does not swap ...
Slackware current 64 multilib.
the only way to get multiple monitors AND compositing (Compiz) on Linux is to use a single graphics card that can drive both (or in my case all three) screens. I bought a Radeon 5750 specifically because it claims to able to drive 3 monitors. I can plug in 3 monitors (2 DVI, 1 HDMI) and the Catalyst Control Center shows all 3, but only 2 can be enabled at a time.
The exact message is:
The current settings cannot be applied. Possible issues may include:
- Display(s) cannot be enabled.
- Setting(s) cannot be applied due to insufficient video memory.
So I'm going to assume that either the 5750 doesn't support 3 monitors, OR, more likely, ATI couldn't be bothered to add that support to their Linux drivers. So this is a multipart question:
First, can anyone suggest a PCI Express Graphics card that can run 3 screens on linux without tremendous pain? I'm looking for something where you install the driver and all three screens "just work". Does such a card exist? Second, if you have a 5750, have you been able to get it to do 3 monitors? I'm running Ubuntu 10.04 at the moment. UPDATE: I got my active adapter in the mail today (it's DisplayPort to DVI) and so far things seem to be better. I can run my third screen, drag things seamlessly between them, and I am also running compiz. The adapter I'm using is a "B087B-005B" made by "Accell", UPC is "826388106239".
There's still a couple "annoyances" that need worked out though: The left most screen is always the primary monitor. Which means the "gnome bar" (is that what you call the applications-places-system menu?) is always on the left most screen. It also means that new dialogue boxes always opened centred on the left screen, which is counter intuitive. Especially if you're using a program like GIMP and the text editor or color picker pops up on the left. Does anyone know of a way to change it so that new windows always pop up on the center screen?
I've recently been experimenting with glxgears, but found people saying this is not an ideal benchmark tool as there are many variants; for example resizing the window affects the FPS tremendously.
I'm interested in testing the difference between using the proprietary ATI driver and the open source driver and also the performance under various distributions.
What's the best software to benchmark graphics cards?
Why linux uses swap space, even if there are free physical memory available.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'm trying to install the drivers for my nvidia graphics card. I downloaded the shell script from the nvidia website. However, there's something peculiar going on. When I execute the shell script it says it cannot find my kernel headers, yet I can verify that my /usr/include/linux/kernel.h does exist. I have selinux on, but just installed os with it on, so contexts are fresh. Checked them as well. After doing some research I found something out. When I run a 'uname -a' I get this.
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Linux ariel 2.6.18-194.el5PAE #1 SMP Fri Apr 2 15:37:44 EDT 2010 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
Yet when I ran 'yum install kernel-devel kernel-headers' they installed the following versions.
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kernel-headers-2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.i386
kernel-devel-2.6.18-238.12.1.el5.i686
Shouldn't they be
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I see that the error in the nvidia shell script can't locate the header files for the RUNNING kernel version which makes sense. Why would yum install that version instead of the one in 'uname -a'? Or am I misunderstanding something?
I recently bought 1GB video card of 'xfx radeon hd 5450'. It came with cd for drivers of windows.
I installed fglrx. Still in ubuntu 10.10 (lucid) I ran: lspci -v | grep -i prefetchable
which shows 256M which is video memory of my ASUS motherboard.
i have a RAM of 1 Gb & swap of 1Gb with fedora11 installed, initially in RAM programme memory uses around 300 Mb & cache uses 600-700 Mb , but after some time it starts using swap memory though my programme memory is still around 300 mb, it keeps on increasing swap memory as a result my system keeps on slowing down & finally when swap memory is 100% system almost stops responding but programme memory is still around 300mb.
View 7 Replies View RelatedNagios had alerted me that the server had a very high load average exceeding the critical level (17+), when logging onto the server I found that all 4GB of the swap was in use despite the fact that there was 15GB+ of free memory (and that's not even including memory from cache and buffers!) Because it seems all heavily used pages were being stored in swap, the I/O wait on the server became very high, and 4 kswapd daemons were taking up nearly 100% available CPU. This did coincide with an error reported by Bacula during a backup job while changing to a bad tape...
From /var/log/bacula.log:
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10-Dec 02:11 bacula-sd JobId 1898: End of medium on Volume "4097" Bytes=434,170,000,000 Blocks=217,084 at 10-Dec-2010 02:11.
10-Dec 02:11 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3307 Issuing autochanger "unload slot 4097, drive 0" command.
10-Dec 02:12 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3301 Issuing autochanger "loaded? drive 0" command.
10-Dec 02:12 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3302 Autochanger "loaded? drive 0", result: nothing loaded.
10-Dec 02:12 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3304 Issuing autochanger "load slot 4096, drive 0" command.
10-Dec 02:13 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3305 Autochanger "load slot 4096, drive 0", status is OK.
10-Dec 02:13 bacula-sd JobId 1898: Volume "4096" previously written, moving to end of data.
10-Dec 03:51 bacula-sd JobId 1898: Error: Unable to position to end of data on device "Tape-1" (/dev/IBMtape0n): ERR=dev.c:1384 read e
rror on "Tape-1" (/dev/IBMtape0n). ERR=Input/output error.
10-Dec 03:51 bacula-sd JobId 1898: Marking Volume "4096" in Error in Catalog.
10-Dec 03:51 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3307 Issuing autochanger "unload slot 4096, drive 0" command.
10-Dec 03:58 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3301 Issuing autochanger "loaded? drive 0" command.
10-Dec 03:58 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3302 Autochanger "loaded? drive 0", result: nothing loaded.
10-Dec 03:58 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3304 Issuing autochanger "load slot 4098, drive 0" command.
10-Dec 03:58 bacula-sd JobId 1898: 3305 Autochanger "load slot 4098, drive 0", status is OK.
10-Dec 03:59 bacula-sd JobId 1898: Wrote label to prelabeled Volume "4098" on device "Tape-1" (/dev/IBMtape0n)
10-Dec 03:59 bacula-sd JobId 1898: New volume "4098" mounted on device "Tape-1" (/dev/IBMtape0n) at 10-Dec-2010 03:59.
At the same time, these messages starting occuring in /var/log/messages:
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Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Mem-info:
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 DMA per-cpu:
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 0 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 0 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 1 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 1 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 2 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 2 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 3 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 3 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 4 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 4 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 5 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 5 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 6 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 6 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 7 hot: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 7 cold: high 0, batch 1 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 DMA32 per-cpu:
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 0 hot: high 186, batch 31 used:162
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 0 cold: high 62, batch 15 used:48
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 1 hot: high 186, batch 31 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 1 cold: high 62, batch 15 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 2 hot: high 186, batch 31 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 2 cold: high 62, batch 15 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 3 hot: high 186, batch 31 used:18
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 3 cold: high 62, batch 15 used:0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 4 hot: high 186, batch 31 used:159
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: cpu 4 cold: high 62, batch 15 used:56
...
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 3 HighMem per-cpu: empty
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Free pages: 732052kB (0kB HighMem)
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Active:4232128 inactive:3071288 dirty:158210 writeback:0 unstable:0 free:183320 slab:256840 mapped-file:289545 mapped-anon:3805487 pagetables:13063
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 DMA free:10796kB min:4kB low:4kB high:4kB active:0kB inactive:0kB present:10356kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? yes
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 3512 9067 9067
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 DMA32 free:213332kB min:2500kB low:3124kB high:3748kB active:1794108kB inactive:1463220kB present:3596296kB pages_scanned:64 all_unreclaimable? no
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 5555 5555
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 Normal free:41028kB min:3952kB low:4940kB high:5928kB active:3409444kB inactive:1471120kB present:5688320kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 0 HighMem free:0kB min:128kB low:128kB high:128kB active:0kB inactive:0kB present:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: lowmem_reserve[]: 0 0 0 0
Dec 10 03:51:47 07 kernel: Node 1 DMA free:0kB min:0kB low:0kB high:0kB active:0kB inactive:0kB present:0kB pages_scanned:0 all_unreclaimable? no
...
Well to cut a long story short, I fixed the problem by disabling the swap partition with 'swapoff'. After about 30 mins all the swap was freed and the server went back to normal. I don't dare reactivate the swap partition and unfortunately as this is a live server which currently has no fail over, I can't reboot either
Server Spec:
4 * Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8214
32GB DDR2 ECC RAM
RHEL 5.5, 2.6.18-194.11.3.el5 SMP x86_64
Running many KVM VMs (All CentOS x64) and kksmd is used.
bacula-dir Version: 5.0.0
IBM Tape Drive using lin_tape module version 1.34.0 according to modinfo
And before anybody asks
# sysctl vm.swappiness
vm.swappiness = 10
In our cluster, both the server and worker had been gone to swap and the performance is extremely slow. Although currently the memory is free but I don't know why the in the swap area is still being there and ubuntu doesn't move them to the memory and empty the swap.
On the other hand, when I run
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sudo swapoff -a
on the server it says:
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mahmood@server:~$ sudo swapoff -a
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I was having trouble getting X.Org to work with the video card in a recently acquired laptop, so I decided to try to probe around the configuration of a Linux Live CD to figure out how to set up my kernel. I chose the Sabayon 5.0 Live DVD because it was the only one that I could find that was the same or newer than the 2.6.32 kernel I have installed on the laptop right now. Of course, the DVD booted right into GNOME without issue, unlike the hangs and crashes that I had been getting. So, I want to figure out what kernel driver this Live DVD is currently using, but I don't know how to. hwinfo doesn't shed any light on the matter, and lspci -vnn doesn't list a driver for my video device, though both methods correctly identify that I have an Intel 855GM video processor. How can I find out this information?
View 1 Replies View RelatedFor the last month, when starting up or shutting down my laptop under Linux, I would get graphical corruption. Startup has an colour inverted, grainy rendition of what should be displayed while shutdown has a red background with all the text replaced by grey rectangles.
At the very least this affects Fedora, Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Windows is not affected. Outside of startup/shutdown the system is fine.
I just bought a new graphics card and installed it. it works perfectly although my sound worked perfectly this morning and I think the graphics card is overriding my built in sound card. I need help fixing the sound. The graphics card I bought is an ATI Radeon Cedar HD 5450 The sound I want to use is HDA VIA VT82xx
when I run alsamixer I get Card:
HD-Audio Generic
Chip: ATI R6xx HDMI
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very much like everybody i am also waiting for centos 5.3, because 5.2 could not sit on my notebook due to obvious driver issues. would anybody tell if centos 5.3 support my x3100 graphics card and bcm 4311 wlan card?
View 5 Replies View RelatedFinished installing Ubuntu 10.10 in my XPS15, intel i5 4g ram, nvidia GT 420M graphics card,
problem is when i go to additional drivers, the driver listed (Nvidia accelerated graphics) when I install it and reboot it the computer starts on the terminal, no graphic interface. All I get is the black screen asking me login and password, when I enter them, just get the terminal prompt in a black screen.
In Fedora 10, I cannot get to the installer because it shows these messed up strips graphics (its not due to my graphic card, my graphic card is supported 7600gt) in non-quiet install it shows logical errors and i/o errors.
View 12 Replies View RelatedWhen I play Bejewelled Blitz on Mozilla firefox or Google Chrome,, it is so painfully slow that it is frustrating, I have all the latest updates from Ubuntu installed including the Adobe flashplayer. Is there some way I can increase the graphics memory allocation?
View 5 Replies View Related