making a ramdisk

[the_darkhorse13]

Hi

I want to make a ramdisk for use a temp dir (Galeon cache or GIMP cache for example). I inherited (friend bought DDR ram instead of SDRAM for his old comp) a bunch of ram and now have 1GB, so I think I have plenty to donate. I've created one by using the commands

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# mk2fs -m 0 /dev/ram0
# mkdir /mnt/ramdisk
# mount /dev/ram0 /mnt/ramdisk

This worked fine, except that it's only 4 MB big! A howto online said I could add a

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ramdisk_size=10000

in /etc/lilo.conf to make the default bigger, however I get the error,

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Unrecognized token "ramdisk_size" at or above line 36 in file '/etc/lilo.conf'

My next try is in the kernel, where you can manually change the default ramdisk size, yet the help under this advises against it. Is there an easier way to do this? Just for info sake, I'm running a 2.6.5 gentoo-dev kernel with a bootsplash provided by the HOWTO in the this forum. Would the initrd be affected by changes to the default ramdisk size?
Thanks

[Regor]

Did you put that ramdisk_size line as part of an "append=" line? It's a kernel parameter rather than a lilo command and needs to be passed as an argument to the kernel.

[Nunatak]

Hi
I want to make a ramdisk for use a temp dir (Galeon cache or GIMP cache for example). I inherited (friend bought DDR ram instead of SDRAM for his old comp) a bunch of ram and now have 1GB

Try tmpfs

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cat /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt

Example from my system (fstab):

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# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).
# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will
#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)
# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
none            /tmp            tmpfs           defaults                0 0
none            /var/log        tmpfs           size=32M                0 0

[the_darkhorse13]

I like the tmpfs thing. I've made a little one for the Galeon cache pages. Just another question, how big does /tmp become on the ram? You have defaults there while the other is defined at 32MB. Thanks

[Regor]

The default is half of your physical RAM without swap.

From /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt

[Nunatak]

I like the tmpfs thing.

I learn about it from this thread:http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=132187

Just another question, how big does /tmp become on the ram? You have defaults there while the other is defined at 32MB.

The default value is half of the memory. I think 512 MB that's enough for my temp files. But importent things: system allocate as much as nessasery from memory (declare value it's maximum)

[the_darkhorse13]

Thanks for the help.

I've just specified the /tmp folder as 70 megs, which I think is more than enough since from my own little monitoring, the folder has made it to 20 megs max...