Amiga OS4, virtual memory and swap partition..

I have a Sam440ep with 512mb of ram and a swap partition of 1Gb. Few days ago i tried to unpack a 250mb .7z archive. I was able to view the content of the archive using UnArc but when i tried to unpack it on my harddrive it wasn't able to do this because it run out of memory... So my question is: what about the swap partition? shouldn't it be used automatically by the programs? (in this case by Unarc)..

@nubechecorre

It should, but I think it needs to allocate the memory as MEMF_PRIVATE. I wrote the 7-Zip XAD plugin and I'm pretty sure it does do this and works with swap memory as I vaguely remember it being reported.

Are you using the latest version? xadlibinfo will give you this.


Edit: code is here, uses private mem and does it in small sections.

First of all, sorry for the late reply but my job is taking all my spare time now.. hope to solve this problem very soon.. Thank Chris, I'll try today and tell you if it works

@Chris

I belive there is MEMF_VIRTUAL that needs to be used.

private is kind of MMU memory, but I'm not sure if its swapped out to disk, it be arranged, to free up larger blocks of memory.

@LiveForIt
There is no such thing as MEMF_VIRTUAL. Maybe it was in very early beta versions of AmigaOS 4.x, about 25 years ago (there were some plans for it, but I don't remember if it ever was implemented/used), but not in any current version of AmigaOS.

There are basically only 2 memory types in AmigaOS 4.x:
- MEMF_SHARED (incl. MEMF_KICK, similar to MEMF_PUBLIC on AmigaOS <= 3.x): locked (can't be paged out and the physical address stays the same from AllocVecTags() until FreeVec()), shareable between different tasks and can be accessed from interrupt handlers.
- MEMF_PRIVATE: Task local memory, unlocked (can be paged out to the swap partition or other, slower RAM (for example with my ZorroIII RAM pager on classic Amigas) and the physical address may change), can't be accessed from other tasks nor interrupt handlers.