Jason Thorpe writes:
>  > I thought that the whole point of a ram disk was that it allocated
>  > real memory and an MFS allocated virtual memory, thus making the ram
>  > disk suitable for things like installs and MFS suitable for every day
>  > use. Am I crazy here?
> 
> Actually, I think it can do either.  For intalls, a small 
> machine-dependent chunk of the driver allocates (turned on my a kernel 
> option) a chunk of the data segment, which a separate program later 
> injects an image into for use when the kernel boots.  Hoever, the ramdisk 
> can also use memory in the same manner as MFS.

In either case, we should really produce an MFS that operates not by
newfs'ing a bunch of memory but by dynamically allocating and freeing
memory depending on the amount of files on store (possibly with a
built in ability to stop growing when the fake file system grows too
large). This would be a lot better than the way MFS works now.  Maybe
I should have a look at that as a project.

Such a file system would probably be better for a ramdisk that isn't
allocated from pageable memory, too, I suppose...

Perry