Strange behaviour of /dev/mem

[Glenn Herteg]

| However, on SLC, IPC and SS1+ machines here, the result is always exactly
| 4Meg regardless of the amount of physical memory the machines have!

RTFM, *carefully*!:

mem is a special file that is an *image of the physical memory* of the computer.

Some machines may not have contiguous physical memory, to allow for
different sizes of SIMMS to be plugged in.  Probably there is a "hole"
after the first 4 Meg, and reading /dev/mem in a continuous stream finds
an apparent EOF when it tries to read a hole.