Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:6233 comp.arch:3222
Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!super.upenn.edu!eecae!lawitzke
From: lawitzke@eecae.UUCP (John Lawitzke)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.arch
Subject: Re: Jerry Pournelle on UNIX (From BYTE)
Message-ID: <5696@eecae.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jan 88 14:13:49 GMT
References: <1999@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Organization: Engineering, Michigan State U., E. Lansing MI
Lines: 27

in article <1999@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, greg@ncr-sd.UUCP says:
> Um, the read-only file system being discussed is over 500 megabytes
 
That's strange, the root partition on my VAX8600 takes only ~5.25MB of
disk space. I'd like to see a UNIX system in which the root partition is
500MB. That would make the /usr partition on the order of 2.5gigabytes.
I shudder to think about the size of the user area.........

> On the other hand, I could believe that interesting portions of it could be
> read into RAM (like the directory tree) so that lookups would be fast

If you knew anything about UNIX internals, you'd know that alot of the
info on the disk is kept in memory. (Think, what does the 'sync' command
do?) Take a look at the paper "The Berkeley Fast File System" that usually
comes in the supplemental docs or take a gander through "The Design of
the UNIX Operating System" by Maurice Bach.



On another note, how about dropping this topic? I think we've kicked a 
dead horse quite enough.



-- 
j                                UUCP: ...ihnp4!msudoc!eecae!lawitzke
"And it's just a box of rain..." ARPA: lawitzke@eecae.ee.msu.edu  (35.8.8.151)