Ram disks

[Brad Templeton]

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