Former Amigan wants RAMDisk in Linux

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1

Hello,

I have chased down every link on Google looking for a method to implement a RAMDisk on openSUSE similar to the Amiga’s,however the only things I’ve found are to work with unencrypted files and caching of web pages. I want something that will speed up my multimedia content creation apps. Preferably scripts would load these apps into the RAMDisk at boot time, and the RAMDisk would grow or shrink according to what was loaded into it. This is such a useful function on the Amiga that I’m surprised that it hasn’t caught on with Linux. Are there any other former Amigans out there who know how to do this?

openSUSE 11.1
core 2 duo 3ghz
8gb DDR2

Thanks.
Zuvuya

2

I don’t know much about using ram disks, but you can create the necessary ramdisk block devices with

modprobe rd

ls -l /dev/ram* (will show you whats created)

Then have a read of this HOWTO:

Linux Ramdisk mini-HOWTO

A different approach is to use tmpfs:

Creating a RamDisk - openSUSE Forums

Should be enough to get you started! :slight_smile:

Please post your progress/results. I’m interested to see the practical applications of these. Maybe you can write a HOW TO for us.

3

Hi
Create a mount point and then mount it… eg create a 2GB one in your
home directory as follows;


mkdir ~/ram
sudo mount -t tmpfs none ~/ram -o size=204800

That should get you started :wink:

–
Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.23-0.1-default
up 11 days 10:17, 2 users, load average: 0.02, 0.06, 0.08
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - Driver Version: 185.18.14

4

deano ferrari wrote:
> I don’t know much about using ram disks, but you can create the
> necessary ramdisk block devices with
>
> modprobe rd
>
> ls -l /dev/ram* (will show you whats created)
>
> Then have a read of this HOWTO:
>
> ‘Linux Ramdisk mini-HOWTO’
> (http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html)
>
> A different approach is to use tmpfs:
>
> ‘Creating a RamDisk - openSUSE Forums’ (http://tinyurl.com/lzew75)
>
> Should be enough to get you started! :slight_smile:
>
> Please post your progress/results. I’m interested to see the practical
> applications of these. Maybe you can write a HOW TO for us.
>
>

I’ve pondered the idea of copying into ramdisk and using aufs/aufs2 or unionfs to handle changes somehow. Sounds like a good experiment anyhow.