I did see the Debian article, but then I saw that ramfs now provides for a maximum size. I'm not a sysadmin and I don't know what backing store is, but it sounded like both ramfs and tmpfs restrict the size that the mounted ram can grow to.
It does look like tmpfs suits me well and I'm happy to go with that. I hadn't had a use for a ram disk prior to this week. Billy On Wed, 14 Apr 2010, Derek Simkowiak wrote: > Answer: Any practical application would use tmpfs. > > A related list post about a RAM disk vs. tmpfs from December is here: > > http://lists2.linuxjournal.com/pipermail/linux-list/2009-December/031302.html > > (RAM disk was the predecessor to ramfs.) > > From http://wiki.debian.org/ramfs : > > "One downside of ramfs is you can keep writing data into it until you > fill up all memory, and the VM can't free it because the VM thinks that > files +should get written to backing store (rather than swap space), but > ramfs hasn't got any backing store. Because of this, only root (or a > trusted user) should be allowed write access to a ramfs mount."
