Re: Mounting a in-ROM filesystem efficiently

["Bradley D. LaRonde" <brad@ltc.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard B. Johnson" <root@chaos.analogic.com>
To: "Bradley D. LaRonde" <brad@ltc.com>
Cc: "Thomas Capricelli" <orzel@kde.org>; <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 1:34 PM
Subject: Re: Mounting a in-ROM filesystem efficiently


> On Thu, 13 Dec 2001, Bradley D. LaRonde wrote:
> [SNIPPED...]
>
> > Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 1:02 PM Subject: Re: Mounting a in-ROM
> > filesystem efficiently
> >
> >
> > > Generally, ROM based stuff is compressed before being written to >
> > NVRAM. It's uncompressed into a RAM-Disk and the RAM-Disk is mounted.  >
> > > That way, you can use, say, 2 megabytes of NVRAM to get a 10 to 20 >
> > megabyte root file-system. This also allows /tmp and /var/log to be >
> > writable, which is a great help because the development environment >
> > closely approximates the run-time environment.
> >
> > That's perfect if you have plenty of RAM to spare.
> >
>
> Well RAM is a hell of a lot cheaper than NVRAM. If you don't have
> the required RAM on your box, the hardware engineers screwed up
> and have to be "educated" preferably with an axe in the parking-lot.

As I mentioned before, there may be other-than-cost considerations for
choosing the amount of RAM on a box.  For example, low power consumption on
portable devices.  For another example, a huge ROM database that doesn't
need to be in RAM all at once.

Regards,
Brad