Sunday, November 4, 2007

Howto make a ramdisk in ubuntu

I would like to make a huge multi gigabyte ramdisk to hold everything I do. I found this code:

Things Linux Can Do That Some Idiots Think It Can't Do

lol... remember my post earlier on about how you can't create big ramdisks on Linux? It was under the title "Things Linux Can't Do". Well, I wanted to make a huge ramdisk for some reason, and I found that the HOWTOs on the web only told me how to create small ramdisks of a couple of megabytes each.

Linux Format magazine has just run a feature on little tricks you can use in Linux, and one of them is about how to create a ramdisk of any size! Here's the code they give for creating a 64 megabyte ramdisk:

sudo mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram1 65536
sudo mkdir -p /ramdisk
sudo mount /dev/ram1 /ramdisk -o defaults,rw

Alter the number "65536" for a larger or smaller ramdisk, alter /dev/ram1 to another RAM device if you are creating multiple ramdisks, or for an extra speed boost you could probably alter "ext3" to "xfs".

Now, I've just got to find some reason to use it... :-)
http://bigbolshevik.blogs.friendster.com/a_man_and_his_penguin/ubuntu/index.html

Ok, like most things in the computer world, the above was bullshit. The guy never tested it. Larger sizes came back with an error of:
sudo mkfs -t ext3 -q /dev/ram2 1048576
mkfs.ext3: Filesystem larger than apparent device size.
Proceed anyway? (y,n) y
mkfs.ext3: Invalid argument while zeroing block 262128 at end of filesystem

And trying xfs did not help either

sudo mkfs -t xfs -q /dev/ram2 1048576
mkfs.xfs: No such file or directory

I wish people were more thorough.

23 comments:

alxarch said...

yes it didn't work because you have to set the ramdisk size during boot, on the grub kernel options
http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html
in short words:
add the boot option ramdisk_size=xxxxx, where xxxxx is the size expressed in 1024-byte blocks (kB) and that will be the max size for your ramdisk. theoritically you dont need to specify the size in mke2fs too. the above link describes a way to do all this automatically during boot which *should* work under ubuntu too. be extra carefull with permissions. a very cool use of ramdisk if you have the ram/use for it would be to put the gimp swap files on the ramdisk, that should give it a lot of performance during image manipulations especially on large images with lots of layers. (haven't tried it though). good luck!

Unknown said...

Thank you. I'll give it a try.

Anonymous said...

In kernels 2.6 you can use tmpfs, e.g

mkdir /tmp/space
sudo mount -t tmpfs tmpfs /tmp/space -o size=1G,nr_inodes=200k,mode=01777

Anonymous said...

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Anonymous said...

/dev/shm IS a ramdisk already available in Ubuntu (and Debian I hear). You can make a directory in there and then add a shortcut to nautilus.

eg; In the startup programs (System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications) add a command that just says this.

mkdir /dev/shm/RAM

Then restart and navigate to /dev/shm in Nautilus and drag the RAM directory into the sidebar to make a bookmark and voila! You now have an easily accessible Ramdisk that is HALF the size of your total RAM.

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Jabber said...

There's an easier way outlined here:
http://www.techtach.org/using-and-mounting-a-ram-disk-in-ubuntu-the-easy-way

maarten said...

Don't put a size on your ramdisk it is totally dynamic. Even if you should reach the size of your defined ram disk you can still continue to write to it (until you have no more ram left).
With tmpfs on the other hand you can't, if it reaches it defined size it gives an error.

ram disk can only use memory, tmpfs can use swap also.

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