Free Software Linux

When your computer needs to run programs that are bigger than your available physical memory, most modern operating systems use a technique called swapping, in which chunks of memory are temporarily stored on the hard disk while other data is moved into physical memory space.

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"The problem with swap over network is the generic swap problem: needing memory to free memory. Normally this is solved using mempools, as can be seen in the BIO layer," explained Peter Zijlstra. "Swap over network has the problem that the network subsystem does not use fixed sized allocations, but heavily relies on kmalloc(). This makes mempools unusable."