Creating a Ramdisk tmp

Download Patch:	http://svn.clfs.org/svn/repos/patches/mountfs/mountfs-0.1-RAMDISKTMP-2.patch

This page will detail how to have /tmp and /var/tmp run under a mounted RAMDISK /dev/ram0. This is done for several reasons. First, if /tmp and /var/tmp are mounted under root /, they can cause large amounts of disk fragmentation due to the creation/deletion of a large amount of files. Second there is a noticeable performance gain, especially when dealing with large programs, (ie, KDE, gnome, OpenOffice, Etc) that use /tmp and /var/tmp to store/interact with information. I would not recommend this process for systems with a small amounts of ram.

Ensure kernel has Ramdisk Support

--- Block devices 
       <*>   RAM block device support                                                
       (16)    Default number of RAM disks                                           
       (4096)  Default RAM disk size (kbytes)

Tell the kernel to make the Ramdisk at boot

You will need to edit which ever boot loader menu you have {IE:grub, lilo} and add ramdisk_size=56000 to the kernel boot parameters. It should resemble the following. This tells the kernel to create a ramdisk 56Mb in size.

title CLFS YOUR_VERSION
root (hdX,X)
kernel /boot/clfs_YOUR_KENREL root=/dev/{XXX} ramdisk_size=56000

Add the process to the bootscripts

cd /etc/rc.d/init.d/
patch -Np1 -i ~/mountfs-0.1-RAMDISKTMP-2.patch
ln -sf /tmp /var/tmp

Add /tmp and /var/tmp to /etc/fstab

Edit your /etc/fstab and add /tmp

/dev/ram0       /tmp    ext2    defaults        0       0

You are now done creating a Ramdisk. Restart your system and enjoy!