On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Frank Peters<frank.pet...@comcast.net> wrote: > However, I am not clear on how tmpfs will fail. If the tmpfs mount > becomes filled or exceeds the file limit, since it is essentially just > another disk partition shouldn't it produce a "No more space left on device" > error? Or is the system designed to extend the tmpfs through swapping? > The latter option doesn't seem right, but everyone still refers to such > behavior.
I'm certainly not an expert but my understanding is that it will not exceed the size given (or defaulted - half of system RAM?) - but the part about resizing and using swap I believe has more to do with how it uses the available RAM in the system. In other words if you have a 2 gig tmpfs it's not going to eat up 2gb of your RAM unless you have actually put 2gb of files onto it. So it dynamically uses RAM when necessary. If the files in the tmpfs exceed the available RAM on the system, then it'll do what any other out-of-memory situation would do: swap.
