Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watmath.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!bstempleton From: bstempleton@watmath.UUCP (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: Ram disks Message-ID: <5612@watmath.UUCP> Date: Fri, 5-Aug-83 03:31:40 EDT Article-I.D.: watmath.5612 Posted: Fri Aug 5 03:31:40 1983 Date-Received: Fri, 5-Aug-83 08:09:45 EDT References: <3598@sri-arpa.UUCP> Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 21 I have thought for some time it would be nice to see more use of cheap ram to speed things up a bit. We have all seen discussion of using ram in /tmp for compiles, but why not have something the user can control. Essentially it's just like a register declaration, this is a hit to the buffer program that these files are going to be high use and how about trying to keep them in ram. Compilers could "ram" and "unram" their temp files. Users of single user systems could "ram" the files they are currently working on. Another very simple idea would be a /dev/freshram device. This would, whenever opened, give you a fresh buffer of ram, different each time, which gets paged to disk only if too big. You would use it just like a normal file (read, write, seek, stat etc.) and you could pass the file descriptor to your kids. (a handy way of passing large amounts of data quickly to kids without a pipe that goes to disk anyway. It would of course be nice to "ram" a pipe, too. -- Brad Templeton - Waterloo, Ont. (519) 886-7304