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Posts: 1,258 | Thanked: 672 times | Joined on Mar 2009
#68
Originally Posted by pycage View Post
The device is very unresponsive during flash disk IO. I think this is the real problem with swap here. Doesn't the controller use DMA?
It's not the lack of dma that makes it unresponsive. If data that isn't in ram is needed for an app, then for that app to continue to run, that data must be fetched. The app continues running when the data has arrived. Other apps can continue to run.

If it was not using DMA, then everything would halt.

Of course, if the task switcher or X is one of the apps waiting for data to arrive it looks like everything stopped..