maemo.org - Talk - N12 emmc, how to activate 756mb swap memory help

Why do you want to enable swap? Swap is disabled in NITDroid because it is not properly used by Android kernel and system AFAIK. See http://groups.google.com/group/andro...9c30688a?pli=1 and http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...299813#2299813 (these threads are quoted in android 0.0.8 changelog near the point "* swap is disabled", here: http://forum.nitdroid.com/index.php?topic=315.0). The important part is the reposponse made by Dianne Hackborn:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dianne Hackborn

On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Dmitry Grinberg <dmitr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> My question was about that exactly: are there specific provisions in code
> to forcefully avoid usage of swap, or is it just that nobody tested it with
> swap?

It was designed with the assumption there would be no swap. Instead it
relies on an out of memory killer to remove background processes when memory
is getting low. Having this behavior work well with swap raises a lot of
issues about how the two interact... to be honest, I would lean towards not
using swap even if you can because a swapping system results in a much worse
experience (delayed UI response) than one where background processes are
killed.

Note that we *do* rely on paging, just not swap.

--
Dianne Hackborn
Android framework engineer
hack...@android.com

Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to
provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such
questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and
answer them.

So there is some out-of-memory killer that kills background processes when RAM is getting low and is not aware of swap and thus even when having swap enabled, device can still behave like it is out of memory... am I right?