32mb Ramfs On C3000, ... and how to get rid of it Options

[Blake]

First, I apologize if there is a better forum for this question, but I've googled this a bit and found little discussion on the topic.

I got a c3000 recently and put Angstrom on it. It creates a 32Mb ramfs on startup, just like my old 5500 did.

I remember from my 5500 days that OZ would build a selection of kernels with different sized ramdisks.

I want the other half of my memory available. Will I need to build my own kernel for that? Is there a way to simply unmount that ramfs and free that memory?

Who out there has 64Mb available on his/her Z (with an EABI 2.6 kernel)?

Thanks for your help.

[Capn_Fish]

Would that be the "tempfs" mounted on /media/ram? free claims I have 60MB RAM (on a C3100), or which 49MB is free (minus buffers/cache). If I am indeed losing 32MB to this ramfs, I too would be interested in getting rid of it.

[JohnX]

This is a much more flexible "ramdisk" than the one that was enabled on the Sharp ROM (and some OZ releases) for the 5500. This newer type of "ramdisk" (tmpfs) only takes up as much RAM as whatever is stored on it. It helps performance and makes your flash live longer to have /tmp and /dev be stored in RAM.

[Capn_Fish]

Awesome. So even though it says the "tmpfs" is 30MB, it will only be taking up a fraction of that in RAM?

[JohnX]

If you run df -h and it shows the tmpfs has 60KB of files stored on it then 60KB of RAM is taken up. Also if you use swap, the contents of the tmpfs can be swapped as well (when needed).

[Capn_Fish]

Thanks for the information!

[speculatrix]

I agree, ramfs is a potentially very useful tool, and relatively harmless provided you remember that you shouldn't overflow it, and that its contents will disappear when you reboot!