Re: question about kernel 2.4 ramdisk

[Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com>]

Hi David,

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001, David Gibson wrote:
> The options are different because the ramfs limits patch predates
> shmfs.

But tmpfs made it earlier into the kernel and if we want to merge the
ramfs patch we should unify the options.

>> Further thought: Wouldn't it be better to add a no_swap mount
>> option to shmem and try to merge the two? There is a lot of code
>> duplication between mm/shmem.c and fs/ramfs/inode.c.
> 
> Possibly.  In fact the patch to fs/ramfs/inode.c will be
> insufficient - the limits patch also requires a change to struct
> address_space_operations in fs.h, and also a change in mm/pagemap.c.
> shmfs applies the limits in a different way which doesn't need this, I
> haven't looked at it enough to see how it's done - by the time shmfs
> came around I'd moved on from the ramfs stuff.

I thought the patch in question does it without the removepage
operation.

> On the other hand one of the nice things about ramfs is it's
> simplicity and ramfs with limits is quite a bit less complex than
> shmfs. 

But the core of shmem is always compiled. And the rest is as simple as
ramfs...

Greetings
		Christoph