using ramdisks

[xenocon]

I recently heard about ram disks, ie using /dev/ram* as another partition. It seems to me like this would be a great idea, except for the small annoyance that ram loses all information when the computer is powered down.

I have an idea to copy /bin /sbin /usr/bin and /usr/sbin to a ram disk partition. my reasoning is that I rarely install new software so /usr/bin et al are unlikly to change much. I could see this as beneficial to start times of programs while of course increasing the boot time of my machine since it copies /bin et al to a ram disk.

Since i have enough ram (~4gb) and hardly use more than 500mb ( using gkrellm) it seems like this would be advantageous since it would mean that I would use my harddisk less.

I know certain live cd distro's load themselves into ram disk because there is no alternative, but I would think that moving as much data to ram disk would be advantageous to any system with enough memory, since if my MMU detects a page fault exception , it pages from RAM instead of harddisk.

I have already tried mounting ram0 and ram1 to /tmp and /home/$username/tmp and it seems to be going fine.

How would I go about setting this up to work on boot? I am thinking that using fstab to mount it on boot would probably work, but I still have to format the partition and copy over the files. Would i need to create an initrd script for this?

[sathiya]

I have got a article here written by me..

Overview of RAMFS and TMPFS on Linux

which you would be useful for you to know about the ramfs and tmpfs.

After reading it, i think you would get a better idea about doing things.,


i think the above article will not be a straight forward answer for your question, but you can get to solve yours by reading it...

[xenocon]

Thank you, that helps alot.