tmpfs, ramfs, memfs

[Deepak Saxena]

On Feb 26 2003, at 16:30, Liberty Young was caught saying:
> Anybody have any data comparing tmpfs, ramfs, and other ramdisk like
> filesystems? I have an application with no swap, at 16 to 64 MB ram,
> running on a Compact Flash IDE card. I'm looking for good data on
> whether to use ramfs ramdisk for /var and /tmp, whereas the rest of the
> OS is mounted ro (to prevent file system corruptions). 

The main difference between tmpfs and ramfs AFAIK is that tmpfs allows
you to have a size limit and also allows swapping out of unused portions
to disk. Since you have no swap, the later is not an issue.  Since you
do have limited memory however, and you're using this for /var, you
may want to use tmpfs to keep your log files from growing too large
if that's an issue.  If you need to keep the logs for post-mortem
type reasons, you could have a custom logrotate script that copies your
logs to a separate rw parition on the CF card.

~Deepak

-- 
Deepak Saxena - dsaxena@plexity.net

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