[in the begining] Might have to delve into the History of VM docs for some important related material. No doubt the VM spooling system came about as part of the overall goal of emulating all devices, in this case print and punch. Prior to the advent of networked printing solutions (and even now alongside that), virtual machines printed to a (simulated) channel attached printer. The "output" of a virtual printer goes into spool space.
Note that even VMware supports defining a (virtual) parallel port, either attached to the hosts real parallel port or directed to a file. To understand VM spooling, start there and think of it as a place for virtual print to get stashed. Mainframes also had the concept of punched cards. We don't see much these days of physical punched cards, but the virtual punched cards are going strong! Card images become a tremendously handy means of getting stuff from one virtual machine to another without having to establish other data sharing. (Forget the 80 column aspect. It is just a stream of bytes.) You can even boot from a card deck. [fast forward] On z/VM, spool space has grown to include much more than store-and-forward of punched or printed content. The spooling system on VM is where other things now reside: dumps (both of VM and of guests), bootable systems (NSS), shared memory (DCSS), foreign language message repositories, just to name a few. Nowadays, "spool space" is the native z/VM hypervisor filesystem. It is used for storing anything that might need to survive a reboot but cannot be stored somewhere else. (Config disks are CMS formatted. That is a different story.) -- Rick; <>< On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 10:52 AM, Steve Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > Where could a 'newbie' find a comprehensive explanation of Spool? ie What > it is intended for, how its used by VM and potentially other > products/tools/applications. Thanks. > > Steve Mitchell > Sr Systems Software Specialist > Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas > (785) 291-8885 > > 'There are no degrees of Honesty-you're either Honest or you're not! > > > > CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email message and any attachments are for the > sole use of the intended recipient(s) and may contain proprietary, > confidential, trade secret or privileged information. Any unauthorized > review use, disclosure or distribution is prohibited and may be a violation > of law. If you are not the intended recipient or a person responsible for > delivering this message to an intended recipient, please contact the sender > by reply email and destroy all copies of the original message. >
