Alan Altmark's missive read: >Mine heart is pierce'd by thine arrow, Sir. :-) A looooong time ago I >learned "why ask why? but go ahead and ask anyway as you might learn >something". I was actually curious and immediately struck by the opposite >condition we had on CMS and thought it'd be good for a laugh. Indeed, I >should have inserted a smiley face. ;-)
Forsooth, I wast tired and unduly irritated. Prithee, I beg your forgiveness and pine for your heart's speedy recovery. >A *typical* Linux application could not really use "real memory size" in a >meaningful way. It is indeed like your disk example. Being able to find >out how many cylinders are on a disk doesn't tell you how much data you >can actually store on it unless you have an initimate understanding of the >file system du jour's internals and the disk geometry. That makes me >wonder how a Linux application might compute available disk space on a >directory that is, in fact, an NFS-mounted CMS disk. Anyway.... Right. But this ain't your father's Linux app... >That said, these factoids are *very* useful when you want to handle the >disk, memory, or CPU as containers rather than as a usable resources >(files, data structures, and threads). The app might say, "I don't care >how big it is, I just want another one the same size." or "20% more, >please", yet be required to express those requests in absolute values. In >this particular case I would expect that platforms that don't have a >bios-like interface would be very happy if Linux took stock of its >physical surroundings (peripherals, CPUs, and memory configuration). Not >everyone has "hcp" or "vmcp" as a Plan B, and there certainly isn't an >architected bios for virtualization. (Not yet, anyway. It seems obvious >to me that Linux needs a generic "talk to hypervisor" function to handle >all the things that architects forget when they're designing the Next >Great Utopia. :-) ) I dunno about "containers", but "CLONEtainers" might make some sense in this case. And "hcp" could be "hypervisor communication program", on all platforms...I like it! ...phsiii ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
