From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 25 10:57:42 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from apollo.backplane.com (apollo.backplane.com [216.240.41.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D71A437B753 for ; Thu, 25 May 2000 10:57:36 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon@apollo.backplane.com) Received: (from dillon@localhost) by apollo.backplane.com (8.9.3/8.9.1) id KAA83404; Thu, 25 May 2000 10:57:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from dillon) Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 10:57:33 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Dillon Message-Id: <200005251757.KAA83404@apollo.backplane.com> To: Michael Lucas Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proper uses for MFS? References: <200005251705.NAA67491@blackhelicopters.org> Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG :Hello, : :I'm writing an article on Memory File System, just because I think :it's massively cool. : :We had a thread some time ago on why MFS wasn't useful for certain :applications. I searched through the mail archives, and found lots of things MFS wouldn't be right for, but not much of the other way around. : :What are some good, reasonable use for MFS nowadays? : :Thanks, :==ml MFS is very useful for diskless workstations (BOOTP boots). You can mount / and /usr and so forth read-only, and then mount R+W MFS partitions for /var, /var/tmp, even /etc to make your diskless workstation look more like a normal machine. MFS can also be used in combination with union mounts to make read-only partitions appear to be writable. I don't particularly like to use MFS for 'large' partitions, mainly because cached data blocks wind up in core memory twice (once in MFS's memory map, and once in the VM page cache). -Matt Matthew Dillon To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message