Have 8GB memory want to use ramdisk to compile in.

tuppe666 · Guru Joined: 02 Mar 2004 Posts: 423

rather than filling my hard drive with temporary files is it possible to have a dynamic ramdisk or alternative to compile directly in RAM. I'm teased to do this with /tmp as well.

eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2007 10:38 pm Post subject:

You can sort of do this on a default system as is. On a 4GB system it fits easily, (not sure about 2G), but all you need to do is to abuse the "disk" at /dev/shm (tmpfs) already available on most systems... just untar everything there and have at it. It will steal space from free RAM as you use up the "disk". This is where I finally got a new personal record bzImage + modules time on my E6700 machine, a complete kernel+modules compile in less than 3 minutes... best before this was a 3 minute compile of just kernel (no modules) on a Dual Celeron 450 (with leaner, more efficient gcc... this was probably in the egcs days, I don't remember anymore.)

Honestly it was merely an academic exercise, I prefer to keep all the obj files around just in case I want to build another kernel with slightly different options, saving me a complete (untar, reconfig,+) recompile.
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drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

mount tmpfs on /tmp and symlink to/mount another tmpfs on /var/tmp (or /var/tmp/portage), and give it a whirl.

JeliJami · Veteran Joined: 17 Jan 2006 Posts: 1086 Location: Belgium

Tip/Trick: using tmpfs for /tmp
Speeding up portage with Psyco+tmpfs ?!
TIP: emerge speed-up, compile in RAM not on disc.
RAM disks and Portage = more speed ?
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nixnut · Posted: Sat Dec 22, 2007 10:14 am Post subject:

Moved from Other Things Gentoo to Duplicate Threads.
See links in above post
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Przemek · n00b Joined: 15 Mar 2008 Posts: 4

Wiki here http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Speeding_up_portage_with_tmpfs says that mounting a tmpfs for portage tmp dir
can improve emerge speed. But it seems that normal disk caching of the linux kernel does the same job. I can hardly notice any difference,
so is there any point doing that optimization?

nixnut · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 1:09 pm Post subject:

merged above post here.
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