Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!albanycs!crdgw1!uunet!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: Virtual Memory / doable 1.4 request
Message-ID: <3833@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 19 May 89 22:24:36 GMT
References: <8905160628.AA06371@jade.berkeley.edu>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 19

In article <8905160628.AA06371@jade.berkeley.edu>, 451061@UOTTAWA.BITNET (Valentin Pepelea) writes:
> But this is another prime example of what should not be done. It is much
> preferable to use a reserved fixed partition of a hard drive for speed. Files
> are great when you wish to store and access data sequentially. But when fixed
> size blocks (pages) have to be accessed randomly, going through the file system
> will slow down the access time by a factor of ten, optimistically.

So precalculate all the offsets to all the blocks in the file and store
them in a table. Just use the file system to allocate the file.

Even better, isn't it about time AmigaDOS borrowed a leaf from UNIX' book
and included raw disk device drivers? RDF0: would be DF0: as a single 880K
file. RHD0: would be HD0:, similarly allocated.

Then you could have a partition, RHD3:, as your initial swap file. When
you run out of space, add HD2:s/swapfile.
-- 
Peter "Have you hugged your wolf today" da Silva      `-_-'
...texbell!sugar!peter, or peter@sugar.hackercorp.com  'U`