I understand that unRAID creates a ramdisk which is loaded with much of the operating system scripts and other files.  Where does all of this come from?  Is it copied from somewhere?

 

Is the only way to change the contents of the ramdisk to copy from somewhere on the flash drive into the ramdisk?

 

Also, another user asked questions about determining how much of the allocated ramdisk space is consumed.  The answer provided seemed incomplete ("use the 'free' command").  Can anyone provide insight?

The ramdisk is populated from the bzroot file. This is uncompressed into the initramfs.

There are scripts and tools for uncompressing, updating and re-compressing if you want to make permanent changes.

 

du -hsx /

will show how much space your root ramdisk consumes.

 

root@atlas ~ #du -hsx /

414M    /

"du -hsk /" returns 572775.  Is this the amount of space allocated to it or the portion of that space that is in use?  In the end, I'm looking for both numbers - total space and space in use (or free space, take your pick).

Total space is all available memory. Although using it would crash your system.

 

grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo  returns what the total availability is.

du -hsk / returns what is currently used.

 

 

 

So are you saying that the ramdisk system will dynamically allocate additional space from the memory as needed, without limit (other than the the available RAM)?

So are you saying that the ramdisk system will dynamically allocate additional space from the memory as needed, without limit (other than the the available RAM)?

 

Currently, the initramfs that is used for the root filesystem allocates additional space from memory (cache) as needed without limit.

I.E. if your syslog grows too large too fast, you will run out of ram and the system will crash.

 

In addition initramfs cannot be swapped out as it uses the cache.

 

Now tmpfs can be set with a limit and it can also be swapped out if there is memory pressure.