Re: 2.6.20-rc6 ramdisk problem

[Robert Hancock]

Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-31 at 17:54 -0600, Robert Hancock wrote:
> > I'm not sure if there's an inherent max ramdisk size limit, however I 
> > should point out that in most cases, using a tmpfs or ramfs file system 
> > is better than old-style ramdisks. Those filesystems return unused 
> > memory to the kernel (ramdisks statically allocate the entire space) and 
> > also avoid the filesystem overhead of ramdisks (the files are mapped 
> > into pagecache directly).
>
> This is not a question of what's better or not. 
>
> Michal stepped into a real life problem:
>
> 1. ramdisk gets created in the first place w/o problems
> 2. formatting the same ramdisk succeeds
> 3. trying to use it fails
>
> So either #1 or #2 should have failed in the first place. Failing in #3
> is definitely a BUG in #1 or #2.
>
> How does your advise help to fix that BUG ? Ignoring it by using
> something else ?

Yes, there is likely a bug here of some sort. However, that doesn't 
change the fact that ramdisks are sub-optimal for most uses.

--
Robert Hancock      Saskatoon, SK, Canada
To email, remove "nospam" from hancockr@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home Page: http://www.roberthancock.com/


-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/