Sharpe, Sam J wrote:
2009/4/15 Mike Wright <mike.wright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
Oh, great pool of collective wisdom, oracle of all, please be so kind as to
share your knowledge with me.
I seek knowledge of ramdisks.
1) In /dev there are 16 ramdisks of 16M each. Are these free for the
current user or are there other system processes that require them?
Yes they should be free.
If they are free to use do I need them to exist if I have no use for them?
They don't exist (they aren't using any RAM) if you aren't using them...
2) Where are these created? I've seen documents that say one may add kernel
options in grub/lilo to set their size but that implies that they all have
that same size in common. Where is their quantity determined?
The kernel creates them. Here's a primer that's still pretty relevant:
http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html
Been there...
In particular if you look at /boot/config-`uname -r` which is the
config your running kernel was created with, you will see:
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_COUNT=16
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM_SIZE=16384
So without a kernel reconfig, you can't change them, but see my answer
above about them not using any space.
Wow. Now that was very informative. I didn't think to look in the
kernel configs.
3) Must they be created during the boot process?
Depends what you mean. Yes those ones must be created during the boot
process because the kernel is configured like that, but extra ones can
be created outside the boot process as well.
Is there a way to override all of that and create my own layout? For my
application I'd rather have two ramdisks, one 10M and the other 30M, plus
any other(s) that may be required by the o/s.
Now that, I don't know the answer to because I've never wanted two ram
disks of different sizes. I've set the ramdisk_size kernel parameter
to something bigger and only used one disk but never two of different
sizes. You'll need some other collective wisdom ;o)
I came up with a solution that uses LVM and it works a *charm*, albeit,
probably because of large block sizes relative to the 16M size of the
ramdisks, seems inefficient (costs 25% each). Maybe I can tune these
and get better.
pvcreate /dev/ram15
pvcreate /dev/ram14
pvcreate /dev/ram13
pvcreate /dev/ram12
vgcreate my36Mdisk /dev/ram15 /dev/ram14 /dev/ram13
vgcreate my12Mdisk /dev/ram/12
lvcreate -n myRamDisk1 -L 36M my36Mdisk
lvcreate -n myRamDisk2 -L 12M my12Mdisk
mkfs.....
... and I have my ramdisks and my app screams!!!!
Sam, thanks for the help :D
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