Disappearing debug

[Roger B.A. Klorese]

In article <89Sep19.181545edt.57392 at ugw.utcs.utoronto.ca> LEONARDZ at UOGUELPH.BITNET ("Len Zaifman  UoGuelph 824-4120 xt 6566", 519) writes:
>     Our operations group was running a backup recently, which crashed.
>The system was brought up again and much to my dismay(at a later date), there
>was no /debug file system(using df to show what was there). The processes
>seemed to be running normally, and using the command from /etc/init.d
>to mountfsys the /debug, it appeared. Can someone explain what was going on?
>In particular, how can processes run without swap space?? Are they all kept
>in memory?? What would have happened if we ran out of physical memory and
>had to swap ??

/debug (or, in RISC/os, /proc) is *NOT* your swap space.  It's a special
type of virtual filesystem which presents a view of your running processes
accessible through the file namespace.  If it's not mounted, you just can't
use programs (like some debuggers and other tools) that access processes by
opening them like files.  This has *nothing* to do with your swap space.
-- 
ROGER B.A. KLORESE      MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.      phone: +1 408 720-2939
928 E. Arques Ave.  Sunnyvale, CA  94086                        rogerk at mips.COM
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"I want to live where it's always Saturday."  -- Guadalcanal Diary