Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!ukc!edcastle!aiai!richard From: richard@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) Newsgroups: comp.unix.internals Subject: Re: RAM disk. Message-ID: <3555@skye.ed.ac.uk> Date: 15 Oct 90 17:44:33 GMT References: <18574@rpp386.cactus.org> <1850@necisa.ho.necisa.oz> <1990Oct11.185949.29164@iconsys.uucp> <15785@csli.Stanford.EDU> Reply-To: richard@aiai.UUCP (Richard Tobin) Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Lines: 19 In article <15785@csli.Stanford.EDU> poser@csli.stanford.edu (Bill Poser) writes: >Supposing that RAM disk is a wonderful thing, I don't see why it >requires any change to UNIX. Couldn't the RAM used for this be >treated as a device and mapped into the filesystem in the same way >as any other block device? It could. Indeed, I believe there are people who sell boxes full of slowish RAM chips as fast disks (this could also be useful for paging on a machine which can't have more main memory added). You might well want to avoid the waste of having blocks from the RAM disk duplicated in the buffer cache, however. -- Richard -- Richard Tobin, JANET: R.Tobin@uk.ac.ed AI Applications Institute, ARPA: R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk Edinburgh University. UUCP: ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin