ramdisks

Sharpe, Sam J sam.sharpe+lists.redhat at gmail.com
Wed Apr 15 21:47:58 UTC 2009


2009/4/15 Mike Wright <mike.wright at mailinator.com>:
> 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

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.

> 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)

-- 
Sam




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