SUMMARY: what is the minor faults meaning in mpstat

Thank you all for the responses. Russell's answer was the most clear one
and I think everybody can have benefith of reading this. Not only those
who don't know, but also the for the once already know it can be
refreshing to read this one:



A process running on a typical 32 bit system is allowed to address 4Gb
of

memory. There is a really huge amount available to it on a 64bit system.


This memory isn't really there, so it is called "virtual memory". The
range

of available addresses in virtual memory is called the process's
"address

space."



Most of the time the process will be holding only a few pointers into

different parts of it's address space and will be attempting to read and


write memory through those pointers.



All of these memory accesses are intercepted by the operating system
(OS)

which maps the "virtual" address the process in using to a real address
in

RAM.



Obviously there isn't enough RAM on most computers to even do a
one-to-one

mapping from the processes virtual addresses to a physical address.

Fortunately, because the process can only access it's address space
through

pointers, it can only access a few addresses at a time. Moreover,
generally

each new access is to an address that is near the most recent access.



Statistically, most of a process's pages will only get accessed once.

However, in the short run there will be a small block of pages that are

being accessed frequently, because most programs contain loops, and

repeatedly read certain pages. Only rarely, (hopefully!) a process will

access a page that it last accessed a relatively long time ago.



Here is how the OS manages all of this:

1. Chunks of real memory are allocated to the process in pages. On
Solaris,

the page size is 4096 bytes. Each page is timestamped whenever a process


references it. If the process writes on the page it is marked as
"dirty".



2. Periodically a kernel process called pageout (PID=2) sweeps through

physical memory and moves pages that haven't been accessed by a process
for

a long time to a free list. These times are in the order of tens of
seconds.

During a memory shortage, the sweep rate increases.



3. If there is a shortage of physical memory, the oldest, dirty pages in
the

free list get written onto the swap device.



When a process accesses a virtual address, one of three things can
happen:



!. The corresponding physical page is in memory. The access succeeds.

2. The page is not in memory - but it is on the disk. This is called a

"major fault". The process is blocked and a context switch occurs. While
the

process is waiting, the page is brought off the disk into memory, the

processes Hardware Address Table (HAT) is updated and the process is
marked

"runnable".

3. The page is no longer mapped into the process, but is on the free
list.

This is called a "minor fault." (I got there at last!) In this case a

context switch still occurs and the page is removed from the free list
and

mapped back into the process.



There is a more light-hearted explanation here:



http://www.netjeff.com/humor/item.cgi?file=TheThingKing





Again, Thanks Russell.



Regards,



Rick



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