Re: Patch (repost): cramfs memory corruption fix

Eric W. Biederman (ebiederm@xmission.com)
07 Jan 2001 23:56:06 -0700


Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br> writes:

> On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> > On Sun, 7 Jan 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
> >
> > > -ac has the rather extended ramfs with resource limits and stuff. That one
> > > also has rather more extended bugs 8). AFAIK none of those are in the
> vanilla
>
> > > ramfs code
>
> > This is actually where I agree with whoever it was that said that ramfs as
> > it stands now (without the limit checking etc) is much nicer simply
> > because it can act as an example of how to do a simple filesystem.
> >
> > I wonder what to do about this - the limits are obviously useful, as would
> > the "use swap-space as a backing store" thing be. At the same time I'd
> > really hate to lose the lean-mean-clean ramfs.
>
> Sounds like a job for ... <drum roll> ... tmpfs!!

If you need tmpfs the VFS layer is broken. For 99% of everything
performance is determined by VFS layer caching. A fs that
uses swap space as a backing store is not a big win. You just have
a fs that doesn't support sync and you can add a mount option to
a normal fs if you want that.

I've written the filesystem and it was a dumb idea.

Ramfs with (maybe) some basic limits has a place. tmpfs is just
extra code to maintain.

Eric
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