2

I create a RAM Disk on Ubuntu 16.10 (running within a VM) with the following commands

sudo mkdir -p /media/RAMDisk
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=2048M tmpfs /media/RAMDisk

After this, if I go into the RAMDisk and do this

df .

I get the following

tmpfs            2097152     0   2097152   0% /media/RAMDisk

So far so good.

Then I reboot Ubuntu (which reboots the VM running via Workstation Pro).

After reboot, I expect either the /media/RAMDisk folder to not exist at all, or to exist as a tmpfs file system with no contents in it.

The /media/RAMDisk folder does exist with no contents, but surprisingly as a /dev/sda1 file system. When I do df . with /media/RAMDisk, I see this:

    /dev/sda1       17413904 9577448   6928836  59% /

Now, I could easily put the commands within my .bashrc and have them run and do the right things everytime, but I need to know what is going on.

Also, could my virtual machine manager -- Workstation Pro -- be doing something?

treecoder
  • 389

1 Answers1

2

What is going on?

Nothing unusual.

df /media/RAMDisk, when it refers to /dev/sda1, tells you the directory at the moment belongs to the filesystem on /dev/sda1 which is mounted on /.

This is because the effect of your mount command is not permanent, it doesn't survive reboot. On the other hand the mkdir command created a directory inside the filesystem of /dev/sda1 and this filesystem is mounted after every reboot so the directory itself survives, but as a part of /dev/sda1 filesystem.

You need to mount RAMDisk after (or at) every boot somehow.

How to mount?

Running mount from within .bashrc is not a good idea because this file may be sourced multiple times during a single session. Since you need sudo anyway, it will be better to use /etc/rc.local which is run once when OS starts.

But the even better way may be to add the following line to your /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /media/RAMDisk tmpfs defaults,nosuid,nodev,size=2048M 0 0

Investigate user and noauto options (see man 5 fstab) and maybe you would like to use them and invoke mount /media/RAMDisk on demand only.

systemd?

This site makes me believe you can run a systemd unit when a given user logs in for the first time and terminate it as soon as the last session for the user is closed. I'm not very familiar with systemd, so I can't tell you how (if) you can do it with .mount unit.

But if you use systemd then you should already have a personal tmpfs mounted on /run/user/<UID>. The system-wide one should be on /dev/shm.

About /media/

Also note /media/ is used by Ubuntu to create mountpoints e.g. for external USB drives (I believe udisks2 is responsible). They may look like /media/<username>/<label> so I guess /media/RAMDisk is not going to collide with anything. In general I would avoid using this location though. In my systems (Debian, Kubuntu, Raspbian, OpenWRT) I use /mnt/<something> and I have never had any issues.

Community
  • 1
Kamil Maciorowski
  • 81,893