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ramdisk 🐏

Convenience wrapper for managing RAM disks across different operating systems with a consistent interface.

Usage

Help screen:

$ ramdisk -h
ramdisk 0.1.0 🐏

Usage:
  ramdisk [options] create [<mount-path>]
  ramdisk destroy <device-path>

Options:
  -h -help      Show this screen.
  -v            Verbose output.
  -size=<mb>    Size in megabytes [default: 32].

Creating a new ram disk with a specified size:

$ ramdisk -size=512 create
512MB ramdisk created as /dev/disk5, mounted at /tmp/ramdisk-401987900
To later remove do: `ramdisk destroy /dev/disk5`

Installation

  • 💾 Download a precompiled binary.
  • 🍺 Homebrew on macOS: brew install mroth/tap/ramdisk
  • 📦 Compile via Go toolchain: go install github.com/mroth/ramdisk/cmd/ramdisk@latest

Platform Support

macOS ✅

Works great and does not require superuser access.

The basic steps followed are:

  • Create an unmounted but attached device in RAM that consists of the appropriate number of device blocks via hdiutil.
  • Format a new uniquely named HFS+ volume on that device via newfs_hfs.
  • Mounts the volume at a uniquely generated path within the /tmp filesystem, via mount.

This normally requires a sequence of arcane commands on the macOS command line which I can never remember, and thus was the primary reason I created this wrapper.

Linux ✅

Things are quite simple and work great via tmpfs on Linux! (But note that most Linux implementations unfortunately requires sudo access to mount new volumes.)

If you prefer a sudo-less route, most modern Linux on kernel 2.6+ often _already_ has `/dev/shm` mounted, which is memory backed, so you can also just use that without any initialization at all.

Windows ❌

This would be great, unfortunately there is no built-in support at the operating system level at current time. The standard solution seems to be to use ImDisk, but I haven't built support for that into this library yet because well, relying on third-party drivers to be installed on an end user system isn't going to work.