How to get rid of the ramdisk /dev/shm?

Hello,

I am using Knoppix 3.2, running from CD-ROM, on a laptop with 32 MB RAM.
According to the command df, the ramdisk /dev/shm, mounted on /ramdisk, is
using 20 MB, leaving only 12 MB for the real work (not entirely true; I also
have a swap partition). This makes the whole setup terribly slow.
I notice that this ramdisk is only used marginally for hosting /home and
/var (through symlinks). What I tried to do to make things faster, is to use
a small ext2 partition on hard disk. I have copied the contents of
/ramdisk/home and /ramdisk/var to the hard disk and changed the symlinks
accordingly. Then I unmounted the ramdisk (using the -f option).
But this action did not released any additional RAM (checked with the
command free). What can I do to make full use of the available RAM?

Thanks for any help
Luc Soethout

--The ramdisk itself is dynamic. It doesn't actually take up all that space unless something is actually written to it.

--Did you check the cheat codes?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by glukorizon

Hello,

I am using Knoppix 3.2, running from CD-ROM, on a laptop with 32 MB RAM.
According to the command df, the ramdisk /dev/shm, mounted on /ramdisk, is
using 20 MB, leaving only 12 MB for the real work (not entirely true; I also
have a swap partition). This makes the whole setup terribly slow.
I notice that this ramdisk is only used marginally for hosting /home and
/var (through symlinks). What I tried to do to make things faster, is to use
a small ext2 partition on hard disk. I have copied the contents of
/ramdisk/home and /ramdisk/var to the hard disk and changed the symlinks
accordingly. Then I unmounted the ramdisk (using the -f option).
But this action did not released any additional RAM (checked with the
command free). What can I do to make full use of the available RAM?

Thanks for any help
Luc Soethout

---

Thanks Dave,

You are probably right. I copied a large file to /ramdisk, and indeed, the used space on the swap partition increased by that amount. And vice versa.
Apparently, normal system operation already uses all the available 'real' RAM memory (approximately 29 MB of the available 30 MB).

What do you mean by your comment regarding the cheats? I don't see any code to bypass the ramdisk.

Regards
Luc Soethout