Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!vsi1!wyse!mips!sultra!dtynan
From: dtynan@sultra.UUCP (Der Tynan)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: Re: ST Minix -- Mounting the hard disk on /
Message-ID: <2637@sultra.UUCP>
Date: 11 Nov 88 00:58:02 GMT
References: <5269@louie.udel.EDU>
Organization: Tynan Computers, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 30

In article <5269@louie.udel.EDU>, escd!es66!karl@decwrl.dec.com (Karl Rowley) writes:
> 
> The hard disk is probably fast enough to make the ramdisk unnecessary in 
> some situations.  At boot time it would be nice to be able to simply 
> mount the root filesystem from one partition on the hard disk, and forget
> about the ramdisk completely.  
> 
> What would have to be changed to eliminate use of the ramdisk?  Does such
> a change require recompiling the kernel?
> 
> 				Karl Rowley

I've done this for the IBM-PC version, for two reasons; i/  I want to run
tasks in the background, which you can't really do, when ~240K is missing,
and ii/  I was sick of running out of space in /tmp.  The changes I made,
were relatively simple.  There are two variations on this theme.  One uses
the /dev/ram purely for /tmp, which speeds up compiles, and alleviates the
'no space' issue somewhat, but it still takes up precious PC memory.  What
I did is remove all traces of the RAMDISK, from the kernel (yes, it has to
be recompiled).  I don't have the information with me, but I had to edit
files in fs, mm, and of course, kernel.  Be careful when doing this, because
I managed to reinitialize my hard disk in the process.  Personally, I think
that there is probably enough interest to warrant using #ifdefs in the code.
If there's enough interest, I'll post the diffs.
						- Der
-- 
	dtynan@sultra.UUCP  (Dermot Tynan @ Tynan Computers)
	{mips,pyramid}!sultra!dtynan

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