The AIX mkramdisk command allows system administrators to create memory-resident file systems. The performance benefits of using RAM disk can be astonishing. The unload of a large TSM database was reduced from 40 hours on SAN disks down to 10 minutes using RAM disk.

The configuration of a RAM disk file system is very simple and takes just a few minutes. Once the file system is mounted, it can be used like any other file system. There are three steps involved: creating the RAM disk, making the file system and then mounting the file system.

First, we create the RAM disk, specifying the size we want. Let's create a RAM disk of 4 GB:

# mkramdisk 4G

The system will assign the next available RAM disk. Since this is our first one, it will be assigned the name ramdisk0:

# ls -l /dev/ram*
brw-------    1 root system  46, 0 Sep 22 08:01 /dev/ramdisk0

If there isn't sufficient available memory to create the RAM disk you have requested, the mkramdisk command will alert you. Free up some memory or create a smaller size RAM disk. You can use Dynamic LPAR on the HMC or IVM to assign more memory to your partition.

We could use the RAM disk /dev/ramdisk0 as a raw logical volume, but here we’re going to create and mount a JFS2 file system. Here's how to create the file system using the RAM disk as its logical volume:

# mkfs -V jfs2 /dev/ramdisk0

Now create the mount point:

# mkdir -p /ramdisk0

And mount the file system:

# mount -V jfs2 -o log=NULL /dev/ramdisk0 /ramdisk0

Note: mounting a JFS2 file system with logging disabled (log=NULL) only works in AIX 6.1. On AIX 5.3, here are the steps to create the ramdisk:

# mkramdisk 4G
# mkfs -V jfs /dev/ramdisk0
# mkdir /ramdisk0
# mount -V jfs -o nointegrity /dev/ramdisk0 /ramdisk0

You should now be able to see the new file system using df and you can write to it as you would any other file system. When you're finished, unmount the file system and then remove the ramdisk using the rmramdisk command.

# rmramdisk ramdisk0

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