Re: [RFC] rootmpfs

From: Rob Landley
Date: Tue Apr 09 2013 - 10:52:16 EST


On 04/05/2013 02:53:12 PM, Byron Stanoszek wrote:
Rob,

FWIW I have a patch to do something like this. It even gives you a rdsize=xxx
tunable kernel parameter that lets you specify the size of the tmpfs, which
acts like the -osize= mount flag (so phrases like 100M or 20% works). So doing
things like 'cat /dev/zero > filename' will not run you out of all available
memory. (Note: If you don't specify rdsize= on the kernel command line, it will
not convert rootfs to tmpfs).

In init/do_mounts.c the boot infrastructure already has kernel command line options "rootflags=" and "rootfstype=", so the logical thing to do is probably to hook those up to rootfs. (That way instead of special casing a new option we use the existing tmpfs option parsing.)

The default tmpfs size is 50%, which solves the "trivial to exhaust memory and panic a kernel running under rootfs" problem. Having one tmpfs also fixes the case that multiple tmpfs mounts (for /home and /var, for example,) have separate memory limits that don't coordinate with each other, so if /home can use 30% and /var can use 30%, that's 60% plus whatever rootfs is already using, so you can easily squeeze the kernel against the wall without meaning to. (Yes, you can make one tmpfs mount and --bind mount from there to elsewhere, I've seen that done. Having rootfs just _be_ tmpfs makes this much easier to track.)

See attached.

You're not actually changing the type of rootfs, you're overmounting it with a second filesystem instance. (Mine hasn't got a "change", it just mounts it correctly the first time, and there's just one rootfs instance.)

What _is_ wrong with my version is that if you select tmpfs as a module bad things happen; it tries to use code that's not there. I dunno of an #ifdef that distinguishes between module and builtin, so I think I have to add another kconfig symbol...

I'll poke at it.

Rob--
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