Re: [TCLUG:9949] How do I set up a ramdisk?

["Eric M. Hopper" <hopper@omnifarious.mn.org>]

On Tue, Nov 09, 1999 at 10:19:30PM -0600, schewe@tcfreenet.org wrote:
> On  9 Nov, Eric M. Hopper wrote:
> > 	I have a very disk instensive test that I'm running.  I want to
> > speed up my test by having it use a ramdisk instead.
> > 
> > 	Without rebooting, how do I set up a small ramdisk and bring it
> > down again?
> > 
> If you have ramdisk support in the kernel you should just be able to do
> the following:
> mkfs -t ext2 [number of blocks] /dev/ram0
> mount -t ext2 /dev/ram0 /mnt/extra

	Thanks!  After rooting around in various bits of documentation
for a few hours, I managed to divine this.

	I need 70 megabytes because the test I'm trying to speed up
involves lots of random seeks and reading and writing of 8 megabyte
sections of the file.

	I can do what you suggest, but then I get a 4 megabyte
filesystem.  I even tried using RAID to group together all of the ramx
filesystems, and I couldn't get that to work.  Besides, I need 70
megabytes, not the 64 I could get that way.

	I discovered that the only way I could fix the problem by
setting a flag in lilo.conf and rebooting.  Oh, well.  Maybe if I get
ambitious, I'll write a variable size ramdisk driver for Linux for just
this sort of thing.

	Unless, anybody knows of a better solution...  :-)

Thanks,
-- 
Its name is Public Opinion.  It is held in reverence. It settles everything.
Some think it is the voice of God.  Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet
broke a chain or freed a human soul.     ---Mark Twain
-- Eric Hopper (hopper@omnifarious.mn.org
                http://ehopper-host105.dsl.visi.com/~hopper) --

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