Martin Fluch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >On Sat, 13 Nov 1999, David J. Kanter wrote: >> I'm trying to free up some disk space so hunted for core dumps. All I could >> find (find / -name "core" -xdev) was /proc/kcore, which is a whopping 131Mb. >> Is this a monolithic core dump that can be deleted? >The proc filesystem mounted on /proc (see fstab) is a virtual filesystem >provided by the kernel. This 'file' resides nowhere on your hd, but is >generated on the fly by the kernel (also I dont know more about this >'file').
It contains the full contents of the computer's physical memory. This basically means that if you try to read it, the kernel gives you a part of the contents of memory. Once upon a time, a type of memory hardware was called "core memory", and the term stuck, so "core" basically means "memory" (and "core dump" = "memory dump", but this is talking about the virtual memory of one process). I don't know where the "k" in "kcore" comes from, probably simply "kernel". (And "proc" comes from "processes", because originally the /proc filesystem only contained information about processes.) -- -=- Rjs -=- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
