[TUHS] /dev/drum

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 22 Apr 2018, at 18:37, Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> But the term 'core file' stuck, tools knew about, as did the programmers.   The difference is that todays systems from Windows to UNIX flavors stopped needed a dedicated swapping or paging space and instead was taught to just use empty FS blocks.  So today's hacker has grown up without really knowing what /dev/swap or /dev/drum was all about -- in fact that was exactly the question that started this thread. 

Well, I had known but forgotten in fact.  There's also a distinction between whether a system swaps/pages onto a dedicated device and whether it exposes that device by some special name in /dev.  Solaris does (or did until fairly recently: I don't remember what the ZFSy systems do) generally use one or more special devices (not usually whole disks but they could be, and it could swap on files but not, I assume, write crash dumps to them) but I'm pretty sure they were not exposed as /dev/<somethng> other than the name they would already have in /dev/(r)dsk.
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