I found the option to limit the maximum size of the tmpfs file system. If
you add in the options area size=16m, for example, then it will never grow
larger than 16 megabytes. And it truly is amazingly fast. I did a file copy
between tmpfs file systems that between minix file systems took over 3
minutes to complete on my system, and it finished in less than 20 seconds
with the tmpfs file systems.
I certainly recommend everyone running a 2.4 kernel to test out the tmpfs
file system for their non-root partitions. I might even look into the kernel
patches we use to allow initrd to create a tmpfs root file system in the
next week or two.
Does anyone have any concerns or objections to looking at tmpfs as a fast,
feature rich alternative to minix?
Andrew Hoying
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Andrew
> Hoying
> Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 2:59 PM
> To: Leaf-Devel
> Subject: [Leaf-devel] tmpfs for /tmp and /var/log
>
>
> Hello,
>
> Now that I'm using Linux 2.4.5 I started playing around with some of the
> other file systems available. I've found that using tmpfs as a replacement
> for linux and the /dev/ram* devices works great for the /tmp directory and
> the /var/log directory.
>
> The tmpfs file system, for those who are unaware, grows and shrinks itself
> to match the size of the files in it. In this way I use the exact
> amount of
> ram that I need, and I don't have any wasted ram, in the form of unclean
> links in minix. The other advantage is that writes to it are very fast, on
> the order of 4 or 5 times faster, measured by observation, than writes to
> the minix ram disks.
>
> The only down side is that it doesn't have any bounds so it can
> grow to fill
> all of your available ram. For this reason, it should probably
> only be used
> in systems with a large amount of RAM, 128MB or more.
>
> If you want to test it out, try the command 'mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp -o
> rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev' after umounting you /dev/ram2 (or whatever is
> currently mounted at /tmp). You need to be running kernel 2.4.x with tmpfs
> either loaded as a module or compiled in. It is compiled into the 2.4.5
> kernel which is available at
> http://leaf.sourceforge.net/devel/wolffang/kernel_245
>
> Andrew Hoying
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leaf-devel mailing list
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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