Can I NOT have a root acc and still make a RAMDISK in linux?

mechagojira · 09-06-2008, 05:36 AM

I have a user account on a CentOS system.
For my student project, I need a ramdisk with about 300MB capacity.
Can I somehow create a ram-disk although I'm NOT root?
Thanks!

unSpawn · 09-06-2008, 05:50 AM

If /dev/shm is accessable you can use that to write to. Otherwise no you can't, only if your unprivileged user has been granted root rights (CAP_SYS_ADMIN in this case).

Whyte · 09-06-2008, 08:10 AM

Laughable, idiotic, and overly-complicated suggestion:

Maybe you could try User-Mode Linux? (or qemu, or some other kind of virtualization)

mechagojira · 09-06-2008, 11:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by unSpawn

If /dev/shm is accessable you can use that to write to. Otherwise no you can't, only if your unprivileged user has been granted root rights (CAP_SYS_ADMIN in this case).

Thank you very much for this answer.

I wrote a perl-program which does a lot of file-access, reading a line, parsing the line, several x-thausand times. total runtime was 5 hours.

I then copied everything to /dev/shm in the hope that this would speed things up. it didn't, runtime is exactly the same as from HD!

So I guess the parsing of the line takes much more time than I thought, or /dev/shm got swapped or whatever.

anyway, thanks.

chrism01 · 09-07-2008, 11:28 PM

Sounds odd. Care to post your prog?