Re: RamFS 1.4

[bousch@topo.matups.fr (Thierry Bousch)]

Hello Andreas, 

> Many thanks for this implementation of a resizable ramdisk. I love it.
> But nothing is so good that is cannot be improved :-). The biggest
> disadvantage is that the contents of one file are allocated in one
> block. I have changed this to allow at most six segments. Now i can
> even copy cc1plus (1201400 bytes) into the ramdisk :-).

Many people were asking for this "feature" allowing Ramfs to grab memory
even when it is fragmented.  I didn't implement it, for several reasons
(laziness, above all).  The fact that 1 file == 1 block caused some
fragmentation because this block had to be reallocated from time to
time, but at least the number of allocated blocks was bounded by the
total number of files.  If files can be split, this could cause much
more memory fragmentation. 

> I have also made some more changes and improvements:
> 
> - file names are now case sensitive. A program that creates a tempory
>   file and then fiddles with the case of the name deserves to be
>   broken.
> - file locking implemented
> - readlabel and writelabel implemented (probably pretty useless 1/2 :-) )
> - FIONREAD fixed to return the right value

Many thanks for all the changes -- well, some people won't like ramfs to
be case-sensitive now, but they're certainly running programs which
don't know about file-locking, so they can always revert to the previous
version.

> Bonne ann.ie, Andreas.

Gr"uss, Thierry.