sticky bit obsolete?

[Chris Torek]

>Devine at vianet writes:
>... is the sticky bit idea [still] worthwhile?

In article <27300006 at convexs> bobm at convexs.UUCP writes:
>The relevant parameter is not the speed of the disks, but the relative
>speeds of swap I/O and filesystem I/O.

Change that to `relative average access time'; `speed' is not terribly
well defined here.

>Since Berkeley unix has the Fast File System and VM, the sticky bit is
>obsolete for bsd systems.

Not necessarily---not if the swap partition(s) have better access
times than the regular file systems.  I do suspect, however, that
on most systems, the average access times are similar enough that
paging texts from swap space is a waste of that same swap space.
-- 
In-Real-Life: Chris Torek, Univ of MD Comp Sci Dept (+1 301 454 1516)
UUCP:	seismo!umcp-cs!chris
CSNet:	chris at umcp-cs		ARPA:	chris at mimsy.umd.edu