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Seriously though, you can use unused video RAM for a swap faster than disk. http://hedera.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/1445.html

You can use your VRAM for swap..

You could always use it as a ram drive!

http://www.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/144 5.html describes a way to use gpu memory as swap on linux.

On Linux systems, it's possible to use video RAM as swap space. Here's an article explaining how. The article is a few years old, and I can't vouch for it personally because I've never tried it, but it might at least provide you with a starting point.

-Stephen

I remember reading something about that in an old article, but paging/swapping or a ramdisk would be the only practical use. http://hedera.linuxnews.pl/_news/2002/09/03/_long/ 1445.html

Kijori: AGP is a one-way architecture

That's a funny thing to say given that the highest rated post above yours is "VRAM Storage Device" which describes how to use the RAM on an AGP graphics card as block storage.

One-way swap or filesystems just aren't that useful.

Besides, how do graphics cards read textures from system RAM if they can't signal anything back?

Have fun then. The timings on the AGP port are more masochistic than even those on PCI, and you have zero proposed applications for it other than video. I can think of some ugly uses for busses in the past (just about anything involving storage and/or video on USB), but AGP for something else would take first prize.

Well, if you strip away the DAC, GPU, and other non-memory components of an AGP card, you can still use the AGP port as a rudimentary memory expansion port using the Linux MTD driver.

Good if you have a PCIe slot and an AGP slot on your new mobo. Reserve the PCIe display for 3d, use a minimal amount of memory on an older card in the AGP slot as a second 2d-only head. Use the remaining video RAM on the AGP card as a ramdisk or for swap space.

The 256 MB on your old AGP-based card looks much more useful.

Well, this still involves to use a graphics card, but in a bit different way.

1. Acquire a cheapo graphics card with lots of memory, e.g some low-end NVIDIA or ATI with 256 megs
2. Read and apply VRAM Storage Device - How to use the memory on GFX board in a different way...
3. You have a bunch of memory that can be used for a ramdisk type of device or swap space

YMMV with the performance though.

What I would like, though, would be to mount the free part of the video RAM as a hard-drive backed file system. You could put a swap on that one and actually get better performance in the end, althouth only for a few (hundred) MBs.

You mean like this (2002)?

Or also seen here.


Since the mods didn't see the first comment about this... surely they won't notice I shamelessly ripped this off the post right above this one ;)

You mean like this (2002)?

Or also seen here.

That sounds really interesting. Could you point me at a how-to or something to pull that off?

Sure. Google's a good friend here. :-)

According to this report (repeated also on bugtraq), there is important security hole in Bitkeeper (found in November). Looking at the Bitkeeper pages I can't find any notification about the problem or the patch. In the Polish article the guy who found the vulnerability reports, that Larry McVoy just stopped replying to mails when they started discussing when the advisory should be published.

Leaving the but itself alone, the lack of information on their web pages and the lack of the patch after the advisory was published is - especially when talking about distributed internet application - very disguisting. The lack of information what has changed from version to version is disguisting too.

I backed bitkeeper in many discussions. No more.