On Sun, 4 Feb 1996 15:42:53 -0800 
 Jonathan Stone <jonathan@dsg.stanford.edu> wrote:

 > Something I've wonderd about for a while:  why does NetBSD have both
 > mfs and a ram-disk driver?   It seems somewhat redundant. Is the 
 > ramdisk necessary for booting on some ports?  If so, what's the
 > advantage of mfs over an ffs filesystem on a ramdisk?

MFS is simply a filesystem, which is convenient for setting up a /tmp, or 
something.  To get the same on a ramdisk, you'd have to newfs the 
ramdisk, which is a hassle.

In general, I think the MFS is more "useful", but the ramdisk is very 
handy when bootstrapping the system.  In intend to replace the hp300 
SYS_INST program with a ramdisk containing a few useful utilities :-)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
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