Is the makefs command useful?

I had a similiar issue when creating a ramdisk image to be embedded into a kernel. I tried making an image with newfs and had similiar difficulties with the disklabel. Someone tipped me off about makefs and that solved my problem.

If you want some more details, I have it on my website (sorry for the long URL).
http://www.brianrose.net/family/fetch.php?dir=/Brian/NetBSD/Embedded&filename=single.html


roberto@redix.it wrote:
> All I want do to is to install netbsd on flash memory and mount root and
> other fs as read only; only fs like /var, /dev or /tmp should be writable
> and I need to create ramdisk in memory for those devices (it is a bad
> things to write on flash for tmp files or logs).
> 
> And I do not have any swap partition on disk to use the command mount_mfs.
> So I need pure ramdisk.
> 
> I'm using netbsd 1.6 GENERIC.
> 
> As suggested in netbsd-help mailing list, I'm using md and mdconfig:
> 
> 1) I've 2 device in /dev:
> md0a b 17, 0
> md0d b 17, 3
> 
> (a first question: what is the means of these device?)
> 
> 2) to create a 8 MB of ramdisk I run: "mdconfig /dev/md0a 9192 & "
> 
> 3) but before I can mount it I should create a file system with newfs; is
> it correct?
> Any attempt failed: "newfs md0" says "rmd0d no such file or dir.". So I
> uncommented "rmd*" in MAKEDEV and ran "MAKEDEV md0" and it created rmd0a c
> 24,0 and rmd0d c 24,3; rerun the command "newfs md0" says "ioctl (GDINFO)
> invalid argument md0d: can't read disk label; disk type must be
> specified";
> it is sound to me as I must create a disklabel or define a disk in
> /etc/disktab.
> Can anyone help me?
> 
> Thanks Roberto
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 

Brian Rose
brian@brianrose.net
http://brianrose.net