Ramdisk vs Ramfs May 30, 2008

http://www.linuxdevices.com/articles/AT4017834659.html

A ramdisk (like initrd) is a ram based block device, which means it's a fixed size chunk of memory that can be formatted and mounted like a disk. This means the contents of the ramdisk have to be formatted and prepared with special tools (such as mke2fs and losetup), and like all block devices it requires a filesystem driver to interpret the data at runtime. This also imposes an artificial size limit that either wastes space (if the ramdisk isn't full, the extra memory it takes up still can't be used for anything else) or limits capacity (if the ramdisk fills up but other memory is still free, you can't expand it without reformatting it).

But ramdisks actually waste even more memory due to caching. Linux is designed to cache all files and directory entries read from or written to block devices, so Linux copies data to and from the ramdisk into the "page cache" (for file data), and the "dentry cache" (for directory entries). The downside of the ramdisk pretending to be a block device is it gets treated like a block device.

A few years ago, Linus Torvalds had a neat idea: what if Linux's cache could be mounted like a filesystem? Just keep the files in cache and never get rid of them until they're deleted or the system reboots? Linus wrote a tiny wrapper around the cache called "ramfs", and other kernel developers created an improved version called "tmpfs" (which can write the data to swap space, and limit the size of a given mount point so it fills up before consuming all available memory). Initramfs is an instance of tmpfs.

These ram based filesystems automatically grow or shrink to fit the size of the data they contain. Adding files to a ramfs (or extending existing files) automatically allocates more memory, and deleting or truncating files frees that memory. There's no duplication between block device and cache, because there's no block device. The copy in the cache is the only copy of the data. Best of all, this isn't new code but a new application for the existing Linux caching code, which means it adds almost no size, is very simple, and is based on extremely well tested infrastructure.

A system using initramfs as its root filesystem doesn't even need a single filesystem driver built into the kernel, because there are no block devices to interpret as filesystems. Just files living in memory.