A Ram disk is can be useful for many purposes.
In particular when creating a root fs during the building of a boot image.
To create a 4MB Ext2 Ram disk
1. Check that /dev/ram0 exists, or create the device file using mknod
2. Zero the device with, dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=4096
3. Create the file system with, mke2fs -m 0 -N 2000 /dev/ram0
The ramdisk can now be mounted with, mount -t ext2 /dev/ram0 /mnt
4Mb may not be sufficient to build a modern Linux root fs. The ramdisk can be resized, after dismounting. Resizing will destroy the data on the device.
To create a 10MB Ex2 Ram disk
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram0 bs=1k count=10240
mk2fs -m 0 -N 4000 /dev/ram0
The resized ramdisk can now be mounted.
Notes: -m is the reserved space. -N 4000 specifies 4000 inodes. An inode is roughly equivalent to a file or folder entry in a file allocation table. A filesystem containing mainly small files, will required more inodes than a filesystem containing a few large files.
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