Re: PATCH: allow percentile size of tmpfs (2.5.66 / 2.4.20-pre2)

Hugh Dickins
2003-04-01T19:11:57Z

On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Daniel Egger wrote:
> Am Die, 2003-04-01 um 18.24 schrieb Christoph Rohland:
>
> > But on these systems you better use ramfs.
>
> Just curious: Why? I'm using tmpfs on these systems and I'm rather
> satisfied with it; especially the option to limit the amount of space
> makes it rather useful. According to the documentation ramfs is most
> useful as an educational example how to write filesystems not as a
> real filesystem...

Simply because quite a lot of the tmpfs code is concerned with moving
pages between ram and swap: if you've limited ram and no swap, you may
not want to waste your ram on that code! One day I might try applying
#ifdef CONFIG_SWAPs within mm/shmem.c; but I might well not, it could
get ugly, and looks rudimentary elsewhere - do we intend to get serious
about CONFIG_SWAP?

Hugh