[Cockbrand]

Around the turn of the millennium I had a Sony Vaio 505TX, which had the same chipset. My machine was running Linux, and I maxed it out to 128MB RAM.

There was a kernel patch for this chipset back then, which treated all memory above the lower 64MB as a RAM disk, which could then be used as swap space.

This prioritized the faster portion of RAM while still having very fast swapping.

[Cockbrand]

Too late to edit - I just saw that the Vaio in fact had the 430TX chipset, not the 430FX. Both were artificially capped at 64MB of fast RAM, as they were late Pentium chipsets, and Intel rather wanted to sell the then-new Pentium II chips and chipsets if you wanted to have more memory.

[bayindirh]

> Both were artificially capped at 64MB of fast RAM, as they were late Pentium chipsets, and Intel rather wanted to sell the then-new Pentium II chips and chipsets if you wanted to have more memory.

Intel being Intel, back then and now.

[rasz]

Intel always used ram for market segmentation. First to drop Parity support on all but the high end components. Cacheable ram limits on all but the high end components. Trying to monopolize ram with 1996 Rambus deal. Locking ram/fsb multipliers on all but the high end components. It was one of their go to Enshittification knobs.

[zozbot234]

In the modern era we'd probably repurpose NUMA support if this issue came up again, so that tasks would prioritize the fast portion of memory but the remainder would be fully usable as RAM (with fewer of the extra copies you'd have from "swap" use).

[gzread]

That is a hack. It shouldn't need to swap - it should just be able to start using it as normal memory when under memory pressure.

[Cockbrand]

I'm sure it was much easier to implement than what you're describing. So it's a hack indeed.