How does the kernel address swapped memory pages on swap partition\file?

A swap partition doesn't contain a structured filesystem. The kernel doesn't need that because it stores memory pages on the partition marked as a swap area. Since there could be several memory pages in the swap area, how does the kernel locate each page when a process requests its page to be loaded into memory? Let's explain more: Looking at the header of the swap partition from Devuan OS:

#define SWAP_UUID_LENGTH 16
#define SWAP_LABEL_LENGTH 16
struct swap_header_v1_2 {
    char          bootbits[1024];    /* Space for disklabel etc. */
    unsigned int  version;
    unsigned int  last_page;
    unsigned int  nr_badpages;
    unsigned char uuid[SWAP_UUID_LENGTH];
    char          volume_name[SWAP_LABEL_LENGTH];
    unsigned int  padding[117];
    unsigned int  badpages[1];
};

So when mkswap command is executed for a partition, that's what gets placed on that partition, the swap header.

Now, let's have a scenario where "process A" has its memory page swapped, so there's one memory page in the swap area. Of course, there could be many memory pages in the swap area. "Process A" needs to access that memory page that was swapped. "Process A" tells the kernel, may I have my swapped memory page, please? The kernel says: sure, my dear friend. The kernel looks for "process A"'s memory page in the swap partition. Since the swap partition isn't a sophisticated structure (not a filesystem), how would the kernel know how to locate that specific memory page of "process A" in the swap partition?

Perhaps the kernel somewhere stores sector addresses for those swapped pages, so when a process asks for its memory page, the kernel knows where to look in the swap partition, reads the memory page from the partition and loads it into memory.

Asked by user116858 (864 )
Aug 20, 2017 at 12:31