sticky bit obsolete?

[Guy Harris]

> As to that I cannot say; but it is perhaps worth noting that 4.3
> now uses the text table as an LRU cache.  Oft-used programs are
> thus effectively sticky anyway.

Heck, 4.*1*BSD used main memory as a cache for pages; when a text segment is
released in 4BSD, its pages don't get tossed, they stick around in memory
until the page daemon wants their page frames for something else (or until
somebody writes to the block that the page belongs to).  STICKY(8) in the
4.1BSD manual says under BUGS:

	Is largely unnecessary on the VAX; matters only for large programs
	that will page heavily to start, since text pages are normally
	caches incore as long as possible after all instances of a text
	image exit.

I think "ex"/"vi" was the only program that has the sticky bit set in 4BSD.
With enough main memory, even that won't buy you much, since the interesting
pages of "ex"/"vi" would stick around.
-- 
	Guy Harris
	{ihnp4, decvax, seismo, decwrl, ...}!sun!guy
	guy at sun.com (or guy at sun.arpa)