Hi,
seems like ramfs lets the system hang when swapping is involved.
I have a ramfs mounted as /tmp. When I create a large file:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/xxx bs=1024K count=200
(with 128M RAM), the complete system comes to a halt. Hitting keys does not do
anything anymore, console switching still works, but all other processes come
to a halt as well. SysRq still works and by doing a 'saK', I can kill the dd
process - afterwards, everything is fine again.
Same thing anytime I write large amounts of data to the ramfs.
Now today I even had that problem without writing anything to /tmp: running a
compilation that creates one process sized ~100M, suddenly everything froze the
same way as described above. Later a unmounted the ramfs and everything worked
fine.
B.t.w.: Apart from this bug, ramfs really is a great thing. Mounting it to /tmp
speeds up a number of tasks significantly! (p.e. browsing into archives with
mc, which uses temporary files heavily.) IMO, that method should be propagated
much more!
Ciao,
Nobbi
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> I have a ramfs mounted as /tmp. When I create a large file:
>
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/xxx bs=1024K count=200
>
> (with 128M RAM), the complete system comes to a halt. Hitting keys does not do
RAMfs doesnt use swap. It also in 2.4.2 doesnt have limits. The -ac one uses
limits so will stop you totally running the box out of ram. 2.4ac also has
the true tmpfs with swap backing
On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> RAMfs doesnt use swap. It also in 2.4.2 doesnt have limits. The -ac one uses
> limits so will stop you totally running the box out of ram. 2.4ac also has
> the true tmpfs with swap backing
Which one of those should be the best to use when there is no swap?
Nicolas