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I'm looking for info about mounting a tmpfs partition and sync option. Sync makes the data beeing dumped onto the disk without beeing saved in cache. This works with ext4 and other filesystems. I'm wondering is even a tmpfs partition needs the sync option to be specified or it is enabled by default since it is a RAM partition. In my option it would be odd if a ramdisk would be cached in RAM.

tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,sync,noatime,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=0777,size=400M 0 0

In a tmpfs partition is sync enabled by default?

poige
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Viktor Joras
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2 Answers2

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I had to search a bit. According to

man mount

The sync option is relevant only for a limited number of filesystems, not for tmpfs.

So the answer is: It does not matter, since it is ignored by tmpfs.

Nils
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Sync makes the data beeing dumped onto the disk without beeing saved in cache

"Standard" Linux manual states:

   sync   All I/O to the filesystem should be done synchronously.
          In the case of media with a limited number of write cycles
          (e.g. some flash drives),  sync may cause life-cycle shortening.

So it's not about cacheing but rather about durability. Writing synchronously doesn't mean there wouldn't be caching (for e. g., writethrough is well-known caching approach which is very different to writeback but both still are cacheing).

In my option it would be odd if a ramdisk would be cached in RAM.

As explained it doesn't prohibit cacheing but rather prohibits writeback-like behaviour. What would be odd is "durability" for RAM disk though.

poige
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    It made a ton of sense on the 2.0 kernel ramdisk implementation, which actually did cache (I know crazy huh). – joshudson Jan 13 '19 at 19:07
  • probably you misread it. tmpfs isn't block device which RAM-disk is. Also it's not about cache – poige Jan 14 '19 at 02:57