What are 'attaches' in vmstat?

[Dan Ehrlich]

I have a question about vmstat.  What does the 'at' field represent?  The
man page says that 'at' is the number of 'attaches'.  What are 'attaches'?

Here is a sample vmstat output:

guardian:50> vmstat 5
 procs     memory              page               disk       faults     cpu
 r b w   avm   fre  re at  pi  po  fr  de  sr i0 i1 i1 s0  in  sy  cs us sy id
 8 1 0     0  5048   0  5   2   0   0   0   0 14  0  0  0  57  86  40 85  4 10

Here is an extract from vmstat(1):

     page    Report information  about  page  faults  and  paging
             activity.   The information on each of the following
             activities is averaged each five seconds, and  given
             in units per second.
             re      page reclaims - but see the  -S  option  for
                     how this field is modified.
             at      number of attaches - but see the  -S  option
                     for how this field is modified.
             pi      kilobytes per second paged in
             po      kilobytes per second paged out
             fr      kilobytes freed per second
             de      anticipated short term memory  shortfall  in
                     Kbytes
             sr      pages scanned by clock algorithm, per-second

Dan Ehrlich - Sr. Systems Programmer - Penn State Computer Science
<ehrlich at cs.psu.edu>/Voice: +1 814 863 1142/FAX: +1 814 865 3176