TMPFS(5) BSD File Formats Manual TMPFS(5)NAMEtmpfs — efficient memory file system
SYNOPSIS
To compile this driver into the kernel, place the following line in your
kernel configuration file:
options TMPFS
Alternatively, to load the driver as a module at boot time, place the
following line in loader.conf(5):
tmpfs_load="YES"
OPTIONS
The following options are available when mounting tmpfs file systems:
gid root group id.
uid root user id.
mode permissions in octal format.
inodes maximum number of inodes.
size maximum size for the file system.
maxfilesize
maximum file size of the file system.
DESCRIPTION
In the DragonFly implementation, tmpfs filesystems are backed by swap
space. Only memory pressure will cause data to be backed to swap. Nor‐
mal filesystem operations such as fsync(), buffer cache flushing, and
vnode recycling have no effect.
tmpfs stores meta-data in wired kernel memory. Meta-data is not backed
by swap so care must be taken if using tmpfs to store large numbers of
small files.
It is recommended that a large amount of swap space be reserved on modern
DragonFly platforms to accommodate tmpfs and other subsystems. 32-bit
kernels can accommodate 32G of swap by default while 64-bit kernels can
accommodate 512G of swap by default. These defaults can be increased
though it should be noted that 32-bit kernels are ultimately limited by
the amount of KVM available in its small 32-bit address space.
tmpfs will allocate and deallocate swap backing store on the fly based on
usage. By default tmpfs allows up to 100% of swap space to be used. If
this is not desirable then the size option should be used to limit its
size.
Every option that accepts a numerical value as its argument can take a
trailing ‘b’ to indicate bytes (the default), a trailing ‘k’ to indicate
kilobytes, a trailing ‘M’ to indicate megabytes or a trailing ‘G’ to
indicate gigabytes. Note that both lowercase and uppercase forms of
these letters are allowed.
EXAMPLES
To mount a tmpfs memory file system:
mount -ttmpfs tmpfs /tmp
SEE ALSOfstab(5), mount_tmpfs(8), swapcache(8)HISTORY
The tmpfs driver first appeared in DragonFly 2.5.
AUTHORS
The tmpfs kernel implementation was written by Julio M. Merino Vidal
⟨jmmv@NetBSD.org⟩ as a Google SoC project.
Rohit Jalan and others ported it from NetBSD to FreeBSD.
Naoya Sugioka and others ported it from NetBSD to DragonFly.
This manual page was written by Xin LI ⟨delphij@FreeBSD.org⟩.
BUGS
Hopefully not.
BSD February 2, 2010 BSD
