Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 19 Jan 1997 18:39:33 -0600 | From | Robert Wuest <> | Subject | Re: Crazy ramdisk idea |
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William Burrow wrote: > > JJKennerly (jkenner@rain.org) wrote: > : laptop users may want to avoid having any swapspace if they have 16MB or more > : and dont plan on doing too many things all at once, for just this reason. > : (the hard drive will spin up at miscelaneous random times... for apparently NO > : reason.) > [...] > : Another approach that MIGHT work but I havent tried is to have 2MB of > : ram disk, and to use it as swap (???) then use plain swap after that. It all > : depends on weather ram disks themselves are swappable (I'd hope not...) > > No, but you don't gain anything. You lose the memory you could be using.
And more. You lose the fs overhead, too. I still have a swap area since spinning up the hard drive is better than not being able to run an executable when I need it. I use swapon manually, not in the init scripts.
> > Loading apps into a ramdisk ahead of time to avoid touching the harddisk > has the disadvantage of wasting memory also. A ramdisk with filesystem > currently is not resizeable thereby wasting memory on unused apps loaded > into the ramdisk. You may end up using memory TWICE for the text pages of > the same application. A definate loss. > > An idea that has occurred to me is a type of filesystem I'll dub ramdiskfs. > In this hypothetical fs, text pages within executables would be shared > with the ramdiskfs pages, thereby getting around the problem of loading > the program into memory twice. I have no idea how practicable this idea > is nor how to implement it at this time. This would be quite a win for > large executables and libraries loaded into ramdisk.
This sounds great. The big win is when running off batteries.
-- Robert Wuest, PE Empowered Kemet Electronics Sirius Engineering Company by robertwuest@kemet.com mailto:rwuest@ix.netcom.com Linux
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