doc/ISSUES - possible fix for ramdisk issue
I just cvs co'ed debian-installer and I'd like to help get the
installer up to speed as it, in it's current state is kinda hard to
work with, at least for inexperienced users ;)
Anyhow - in doc/ISSUES there is this:
* ramdisk size
How big a ram disk do we need? What happens if the installer is asked to
install just one more udeb onto a full ramdisk, and runs out of space?
Possibilities:
- lvm/md on a ramdisk
- create 1 mb ramdisks on the fly, and put the actual files in
there, symlinking to the real filesystem
- similarly/complimentary, once other filesystems are available,
put the file on them (eg, on nfs, pre-unpacked on the cd we are
installing from, in a spare disk partition).
Another possibility which imho is the best is to use ramfs. I don't
know if it's in 2.2, (since I don't have 2.2 handy), but it's in 2.4:
CONFIG_RAMFS:
Ramfs is a file system which keeps all files in RAM. It allows
read and write access.
In contrast to RAM disks, which get allocated a fixed amount of RAM,
ramfs grows and shrinks to accommodate the files it contains.
Before you can use this RAM-based file system, it has to be mounted,
meaning it has to be given a location in the directory hierarchy. If
you want to use the location /ramfiles for example, you would have to
create that directory first and then mount the file system by saying
"mount -t ramfs ramfs /ramfiles" or the equivalent line in
/etc/fstab. Everything is "virtual" in the sense that no files will
be created on your hard drive; if you reboot, everything in /ramfiles
will be lost.
However, I'm just curious about what happens when the ramdisk grows to
over free ram size..
--
Tollef Fog Heen
Unix _IS_ user friendly... It's just selective about who its friends are.
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