What is "Swap Space" and "Locked Memory" in Solaris?

Question

I am aware of the generic concept of swap space (in Linux). Is the same applicable for Solaris (solaris zones) too? Or is the swap concept different in solaris?

Is there any connection between swap space and locked memory?

Can somebody explain this or point me to a link where I can find better explanations. (did googling, but no luck ).

Also, I am not asking commands to allocate swap or locked memory. I am actually trying to understand the concept, so kindly guide me in that way.

Answer 1

Swap space is basically a way of making your computer appear to have more usable memory than is actually installed. Here is a bit of a description of how it works.

I believe that the swap system in Solaris is the same - at least same enough for our level of understanding, there may be big differences underneath. Here is how to display the swap information on a Solaris system: you will see that the output of swap -l shown gives a list partitions used as swap.

Solaris zones are completely different: they are best thought of as lightweight virtual machines, without all the baggage that normally comes with running a virtual machine.

The idea of locking memory is that you can stop your program's "memory" being swapped out of physical memory and saved to the swap file. Here is a Linuxy page describing it - again I believe that the Solaris idea is the same.