Re: [Devil-linux-develop] thinking about ramdisk size as a function of installed ram

[Friedrich L. <fl...@fl...>]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2002 09:43, Heiko Zuerker wrote:

> ** parameter in /etc/sysconfig/config:
> CONFIG_RAMDISK_SIZE=auto | size in MB
>
> So you could specify the maximum size manually or use our script to
> calculate it. Per default it should be set to "auto".

Hmmm...don't know how to resize a shmfs. There's no option for that.
Why that, you might ask. The ramdisk get's created and then the config
disk gets read and extracted into it. But what I could think of is
that save_config extracts the CONFIG_RAMDISK_SIZE from
/etc/sysconfig/config and creates a file on the floppy disk eg.
initrd.conf. BTW with this file we could also tell the linuxrc script
in the initrd which scsi driver it should load.


> ** more intelligent
> The script should also take care about swap space, but should print
> out a warning when he thinks that the system will start swapping.
> With this warning, the user would know that he looses performance
> but the system will still function as expected

As a start I would just calculate the ramdisk usage of the base system
and each package, create files PACKAGE-NAME.size with the size value
in it. So the initrd can calculate when it has to stop extracting
packages to the ramdisk because the ramdisk would overflow. With this
method we can leave some space for temp files so the user can at least
change his config files. Because with a ramdisk that has 0 bytes free
the user could destroy his config. Happend to me once, so a simple
passwd command destroyed the /etc/passwd file - not much fun if the
machine is 250 miles away and if you drop the ssh connection.


> ** RAM usage of programs
> We don't only need the size of the programs, we would also need to
> know their ram usage when the program is running. But I think that's
> a bit hard, because it really depends on the environment and what
> the user is doing.

I would leave this task to a eg. php script on the webpage where the
user selects what he want's to use and then the script outputs our
recommendations for his system. (BTW is PHP on www.devil-linux.org
possible?)


-- 
MfG / Regards
Friedrich Lobenstock
____________________________________________________________________
Friedrich Lobenstock         FL226-RIPE             Internetservices
URL: http://www.fl.priv.at/                     Email: fl...@fl...
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