JasonB (no@spam.com) on 5/14/07 wrote:
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>Linus Torvalds (torvalds@osdl.org) on 5/14/07 wrote:
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>>Any sane OS (and yeah, XP/Vista may not fall under that
>>heading) will basically always use all your memory, and
>>you will never have anything unused.
>
>Vista (finally!) does this too, not only caching but trying to anticipate future needs and preloading.
>
>So now it's copping a lot of flak for using up so much memory rather than giving
>the user a warm glowing feeling knowing they have several GB of memory "free". I guess you can't win...

Isn't this a different issue (or a tangential one, at least) to what was being discussed? The statement being made (or so I understood it) was that the address space had to map all possible memory addresses, so a machine with 1GB of memory would necessarily have every address space mapped to 2GB. My understanding is that you only allocate pages of virtual memory for what is needed to hold the program/data, and add them as necessary as the working set size grows - is this not a correct understanding?

Regards,
Dean