Re: innd mmap bug in 2.4.0-test12

Linus Torvalds
2000-12-28T19:21:49Z

On Thu, 28 Dec 2000, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>
> this remind me; perhaps you or Al could answer this.
>
> How hard would it be to have ramfs backed by swap? The goal being
> try to achieve something like a FreeBSDs mfs.
>
> I use ramfs for /tmp on my laptop -- it's very handy because it
> extends the amount of the the disk had spent spun down and therefore
> battery life; but writing large files into /tmp can blow away the
> system or at the very least eat away at otherwise usable ram. Not
> terribly desirable.

Jeff Garzik had the code to do this, and the new shared memory code should
be able to be massaged to handle this all without actually bloating the
kernel (ie "ramfs" would still stay very very tiny, just taking advantage
of the common code that the VM layer already has to support for other
things).

Linus