On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, John Hinsley wrote:
John (currently about to give up the ghost on trying to get Linux to use all its RAM and run on swap...guess that pre-emptive multi-tasking is just too clever for me to beat!)
If I understand you correctly, you want your machine to act as if it has no RAM and only swap? You can't quite do this, but close. Some of the kernel obviously has to be memory resident(for instance the code that takes care of swapping!), but you can force the kernel to believe your machine has exactly as much ram as you say by giving this option on the LILO prompt, e.g.:
LILO: linux mem=1m
For one megabyte of memory, which is probably as little as you can get away with.
Do I understand your problem? Does this help? You could also try having a memory consumer process use the mlock(2) call to suck up all the RAM in the machine.