On Wed, Oct 17, 2001 at 01:49:01PM -0400, Paul McHale wrote: | | Does Linux support any RAM drive(s)? How much faster are these drives over | an attached drive? Is there a CPU performance penalty?
According to the kernel FAQ, Linux ext2 implementation is fast enough that it is not necessary to implement /tmp as a ramdisk. Some systems (they give stats, I think solaris is one of them) is much slower with on-disk filesystems so Sun went with a ramdisk for performance with temp files. I don't think you'll get much, if any, performance boost from using a ramdisk. In the kernel config, look for "shm" (I think) in the filesystem section. If you press "help" on it you'll see a discussion of tmpfs (the other name for it). You can then mount it with an entry in /etc/fstab. HTH, -D
