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[Long Nguyen <lhn16425 AT yahoo.com>]

--- David Moberg <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com> wrote:
> > What is a DMA and what does it do?  (I used to work for the Defense 
> > Mapping Agency).
> 
> DMA = Dynamic Memory Allocation?? It is a way of transferring data
> which does not overload the CPU as much as an ordinary transfer. Modern hard
drives
> use DMA to improve transfer speed.

I think DMA stands for Direct Memory Access, which is exactly what you said,
I/O with little CPU intervention.  This is much faster than "regular" I/O.

-Long


                
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