A memory-backed filesystem mounter for Mac OS X
ramfs automates the segmentation of an area of physical memory, allowing it to be mounted as a (volatile) filesystem, much like a DMG image. Please note, however, that any data stored within this filesystem will not survive a reboot or even being unmounted.
The intended use is for high-speed scratch-disks or temporary working areas for high-memory, flash-equipped Macs where reducing write-cycles may be beneficial.
ramfs
works best with GNU utilities (available via homebrew,
macports, or
Gentoo Prefix)
but care has been taken to ensure that ramfs
also operates with the standard
Mac OS BSD utilities. The one exception to this is the numfmt
command which
is used to parse numbers with SI or IEC suffixes into raw values and back
again. This could be reimplemented in pure shell-script at some point, but for
now this utility is required. It will be installed as part of GNU coreutils
(along with many other special-use but very cool tools) from any of the above
package repositories. Alternatively, a 64-bit binary from a Gentoo Prefix
installation is included in this repo.