On Fri, Jul 23, 1999 at 01:13:30AM -0400, Mike A. Harris wrote:
[snip]
> It is called a ramdisk. I believe there is a howto. I can't see
tmpfs is usually on a hard drive, not in RAM. It's also used for swap.
> how in todays technology age that ANY ramdisk speeds up ANY
> system for ANY reason though. The memory is better used as
> cache, etc... Forcing it to ramdisk needlessly wastes the unused
> space IMHO.
It's really handy for a /tmp and other "scratch" directories so you can
just blow it away on reboot with a mkfs. This comes in handy if you
have information there you don't want lifted off the disk (since
rm/dd/etc won't keep data recovery services from getting it).
Yup, it's a bit of paranoia. :-)
> I've yet to see anyone provide useful benchmark results that show
> benefits of running ramdisks.
It does come in handy in another situation: diskless clients. If you
have enough RAM, it's faster to use a ramdisk for some small filesystems
than writing/reading over NFS constantly.
-- DN
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/