Mount and Unmount

Derek Broughton news at pointerstop.ca
Fri Aug 31 23:32:42 UTC 2007


John L Fjellstad wrote:

> "D. Lam" <lam.dna at gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Perhaps he wants a ramdisk?
>> If so, add this to /etc/fstab:
>> /dev/ram        /media/ramdisk  tmpfs,user  rw 0 0
> 
> Isn't it pretty silly to put swap on you ramdisk?  Swap is used when you
> run out of memory.  You are using memory to do the swap.  So basically,
> the OS will swap things out of memory and into swap which is already
> memory.  Wouldn't you be better off not using the swap-in-memory, and
> then the OS wouldn't swap in the first place since the memory would
> still be available?
> 
You have it backwards.  tmpfs puts a temporary filesystem (ramdisk) on your
_swap_, not vice versa.  

By default /var/lock, /var/run, /dev/shm and udev are all in tmpfs already. 
I used to keep all of /tmp there when I used Debian (making the swap
partition much larger than necessary for actual swapping), but it seems
inconsistent with Ubuntu's defaults and I never worked out what I'd need to
do that now.
-- 
derek





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