Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Partition Sizing | Date | Mon, 26 Jul 1999 09:21:24 -0400 | From | Horst von Brand <> |
| |
Greg Lindahl <lindahl@cs.virginia.edu> said: > "Fred Reimer" at Jul 25, 99 04:55:48 pm said: > > > So, educate me please: why don't you install all of Solaris on a tmpfs > > > partition, if it's faster? ;)
> > It's my understanding that one of the reasons that one would use a > > tmpfs for the /tmp directory is because by definition it would start > > out "clean" upon reboot.
> Ahem. The actual reason that tmpfs is not widely used is that it > completely turns off synchronous writes of metadata, leading to > filesystems which can't possibly survive a reboot.
tmpfs on Solaris lives just in virtual memory; if you'd installed Solaris only on tmpfs, you'd have to do so on each reboot. Not really useful, is it ;-)
> Linux already has un-agressive metadata writes in ext2fs, so ext2fs is > almost as fast as tmpfs, albeit riskier (frequent minor damage on > reboot, needlessly requiring human intervention.) Someday I need to > rewrite my boot scripts so that they do "fsck -y" and save me a log of > what got clobbered. When you're rebooting 4096 machines, you can't go > fix all the filesystems by hand. Grrrr.
"Frequently"? Happens roughly as often as with Solaris, in my experience. But the machines I have at hand have different workloads, so my experience might not count much. OTOH, my SS4 here is now Linux (was Solaris 2.5.1), and I see _less_ frequency of hand intervention on boot now...
> > Others have mentioned that a "good" use of such a system would be for > > diskless stations, so that they would not have to transfer "temporary" > > files over the 'net because they didn't have local disk storage...
But they would swap over the net, with the same (or worse) end result.
> Yes, in that case an automatically-resizing memory filesystem would be > quite handy. But it's easy to crash your machine that way by running > out of memory, so it's better to use (less efficient) NFS or samba > filesystems.
That _do_ store your data permanently. It's just part of the cost you pay for persistent data.
PS: Nice troll, not overdone. -- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |