fast mapcalc

[David Wheatley]

>>Most Unix workstations allow you to define a ram-disk.  If you have enough 
>>RAM you can copy your location to the ram-disk and then run grass normally.
>>
>>Jim Hinthorne              Voice:  509-963-2826
>
>Ram-disk? ... Unix?
>
>I'm sorry.  I've only been playing on Unix since about 1983, a short
>timer, and *do not* claim to be a guru, but I  have never heard of
>such a thing as "ram-disk" mentioned in the same breath as Unix.
>
>I know there are a few new things out there, but this one does not
>make any sense to me.  Unix does a lot of things with available ram
>and stacks up a lot of disk I/O in memory, but ... .
>
>Did we mistype DOS?
>

This is rubbish: exactly the kind of half-witted mis-information which gives
newsgroups a bad name.

Some (if not all) unices DO in fact allow 'ram-disks' or whatever you want to
call it. Slakware LINUX, for example, relies on this feature in order to instal
l
itself. In case any true unix anoraks want to know how to do it, you mount 
it like any other disk with an entry in /etc/fstab something like this:

# device        directory       type    options         freq pass
/dev/ramdisk    /ramdisk        ext2    defaults

to find out if your flavour of UNIX can do this, check to see if the device
driver /dev/ramdisk (or something like it) exists. If it does then you can.

Of course you DO need to be root in order to mount a partition, so this
might not be the correct solution to the original question ...
David Wheatley
Department of Archaeology
University of Southampton
Southampton
SO17 1BJ