Blog O’ Matty

Creating a Linux ramdisk

While performing some testing a few weeks ago, I needed to create a ramdisk on one of my redhat AS 4.0 servers. I knew Solaris supported tmpfs, and after a bit of googling was surprised to find that Linux supported the tmpfs pseudo-file system as well. To create a ramdisk on a Linux host, you first need to find a suitable place to mount the tmpfs file system. For my tests, I used mkdir to create a directory valled /var/ramdisk:

$ mkdir /var/ramdisk

Once the mount point is identified, you can use the mount command to mount a tmpfs file system on top of that mount point:

$ mount -t tmpfs none /var/ramdisk -o size=28m

Now each time you access /var/ramdisk, your reads and writes will be coming directly from memory. Nice!