On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, Jonathan Bartlett wrote: > I don't know the answers to your questions, however, you probably don't > want RAM disks anyway. > > The kernel does a _great_ job of managing what's in memory and what isn't. > In fact, I'm not sure having a RAM disk keeps it in RAM - it _may_ keep it > in swap (i.e. - on disk).
nope. there *is* a tmpfs filesystem that grows and shrinks on demand, which is nice, but is only guaranteed to be stored in virtual memory, which means it can be swapped out. a ram disk, however, from what i read, is *guaranteed* to be kept in physical memory. WRT my example of building a kernel, i realize that the linux kernel is amazingly efficient, but during a typical kernel build, there is constant disk activity. i was interested in setting up the source tree as a ram disk and at least benchmarking. it may be that there's little advantage, but i'll never know until i try. > If your RAM disks are using all of you memory, you may end up swapping > your programs like crazy. Anyway, all free memory is used by the kernel > for buffers, making RAM disks fairly useless. again, until i can benchmark it, i'll never know if there's an advantage. and, as i said, when i do a standard kernel build, there is a fair amount of HD activity, so there's certainly *potential* for reducing disk activity. rday -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
