fbp@cybvax0.UUCP (Rick Peralta) (07/31/85)
Is there a facility in un*x to move a file into memory while it's open ? Not just buffering a few blocks, but the whole file. If not has it been tried ? If so with what results ? Rick ...!cybvax0[!dmc0]!fbp "A likely story. I don't believe a word of it."
gwyn@brl-tgr.ARPA (Doug Gwyn <gwyn>) (08/01/85)
> Is there a facility in un*x to move a file into memory while it's open ?
You'd need one hell of a lot of memory.
Also, files are not static objects; they can grow on you.
Now, if you just want to pretend a file is in your process's
virtual address space, that's being worked on in several
places and has been implemented on other OSes. Is your
virtual address space large enough?fbp@cybvax0.UUCP (Rick Peralta) (08/02/85)
>> Is there a facility in un*x to move a file into memory while it's open ? > >Now, if you just want to ... As the question was academic and only designed to invoke comments (like yours), suggestions don't really have to work. As for the technique I would assume that there are a lot of ways that it could be accomplished. Suggestions so far have been to increase the cache, create a "ram disk" and make a set of open, read, write, seek and close functions to use malloc area, and pseudo devices have been made so far. I'm inrested in playing with the ideas of implementing each (as an intellectual exorcise) and see what problems and benefits there are. Possable this should be in net.unix.dreams ? Rick ...!cybvax0[!dmc0]!fbp "A likely story. I don't believe a word of it."