125 lines
5.4 KiB
Plaintext
125 lines
5.4 KiB
Plaintext
Tmpfs is a file system which keeps all files in virtual memory.
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Everything in tmpfs is temporary in the sense that no files will be
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created on your hard drive. If you unmount a tmpfs instance,
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everything stored therein is lost.
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tmpfs puts everything into the kernel internal caches and grows and
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shrinks to accommodate the files it contains and is able to swap
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unneeded pages out to swap space. It has maximum size limits which can
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be adjusted on the fly via 'mount -o remount ...'
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If you compare it to ramfs (which was the template to create tmpfs)
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you gain swapping and limit checking. Another similar thing is the RAM
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disk (/dev/ram*), which simulates a fixed size hard disk in physical
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RAM, where you have to create an ordinary filesystem on top. Ramdisks
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cannot swap and you do not have the possibility to resize them.
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Since tmpfs lives completely in the page cache and on swap, all tmpfs
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pages currently in memory will show up as cached. It will not show up
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as shared or something like that. Further on you can check the actual
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RAM+swap use of a tmpfs instance with df(1) and du(1).
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tmpfs has the following uses:
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1) There is always a kernel internal mount which you will not see at
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all. This is used for shared anonymous mappings and SYSV shared
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memory.
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This mount does not depend on CONFIG_TMPFS. If CONFIG_TMPFS is not
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set, the user visible part of tmpfs is not build. But the internal
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mechanisms are always present.
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2) glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for
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POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink). Adding the following
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line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:
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tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
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Remember to create the directory that you intend to mount tmpfs on
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if necessary (/dev/shm is automagically created if you use devfs).
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This mount is _not_ needed for SYSV shared memory. The internal
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mount is used for that. (In the 2.3 kernel versions it was
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necessary to mount the predecessor of tmpfs (shm fs) to use SYSV
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shared memory)
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3) Some people (including me) find it very convenient to mount it
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e.g. on /tmp and /var/tmp and have a big swap partition. And now
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loop mounts of tmpfs files do work, so mkinitrd shipped by most
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distributions should succeed with a tmpfs /tmp.
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4) And probably a lot more I do not know about :-)
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tmpfs has three mount options for sizing:
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size: The limit of allocated bytes for this tmpfs instance. The
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default is half of your physical RAM without swap. If you
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oversize your tmpfs instances the machine will deadlock
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since the OOM handler will not be able to free that memory.
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nr_blocks: The same as size, but in blocks of PAGE_CACHE_SIZE.
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nr_inodes: The maximum number of inodes for this instance. The default
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is half of the number of your physical RAM pages, or (on a
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a machine with highmem) the number of lowmem RAM pages,
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whichever is the lower.
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These parameters accept a suffix k, m or g for kilo, mega and giga and
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can be changed on remount. The size parameter also accepts a suffix %
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to limit this tmpfs instance to that percentage of your physical RAM:
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the default, when neither size nor nr_blocks is specified, is size=50%
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If nr_blocks=0 (or size=0), blocks will not be limited in that instance;
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if nr_inodes=0, inodes will not be limited. It is generally unwise to
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mount with such options, since it allows any user with write access to
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use up all the memory on the machine; but enhances the scalability of
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that instance in a system with many cpus making intensive use of it.
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tmpfs has a mount option to set the NUMA memory allocation policy for
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all files in that instance (if CONFIG_NUMA is enabled) - which can be
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adjusted on the fly via 'mount -o remount ...'
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mpol=default prefers to allocate memory from the local node
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mpol=prefer:Node prefers to allocate memory from the given Node
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mpol=bind:NodeList allocates memory only from nodes in NodeList
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mpol=interleave prefers to allocate from each node in turn
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mpol=interleave:NodeList allocates from each node of NodeList in turn
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NodeList format is a comma-separated list of decimal numbers and ranges,
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a range being two hyphen-separated decimal numbers, the smallest and
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largest node numbers in the range. For example, mpol=bind:0-3,5,7,9-15
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Note that trying to mount a tmpfs with an mpol option will fail if the
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running kernel does not support NUMA; and will fail if its nodelist
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specifies a node >= MAX_NUMNODES. If your system relies on that tmpfs
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being mounted, but from time to time runs a kernel built without NUMA
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capability (perhaps a safe recovery kernel), or configured to support
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fewer nodes, then it is advisable to omit the mpol option from automatic
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mount options. It can be added later, when the tmpfs is already mounted
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on MountPoint, by 'mount -o remount,mpol=Policy:NodeList MountPoint'.
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To specify the initial root directory you can use the following mount
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options:
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mode: The permissions as an octal number
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uid: The user id
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gid: The group id
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These options do not have any effect on remount. You can change these
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parameters with chmod(1), chown(1) and chgrp(1) on a mounted filesystem.
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So 'mount -t tmpfs -o size=10G,nr_inodes=10k,mode=700 tmpfs /mytmpfs'
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will give you tmpfs instance on /mytmpfs which can allocate 10GB
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RAM/SWAP in 10240 inodes and it is only accessible by root.
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Author:
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Christoph Rohland <cr@sap.com>, 1.12.01
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Updated:
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Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>, 19 February 2006
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