The performance of a RAM drive is in general orders of magnitude faster than other forms of storage media, such as an SSD, hard drive, tape drive, or optical drive. This performance gain is due to multiple factors, including access time, maximum throughput, and type of file system because the storage is in RAM, it is volatile memory, which means it will be lost in the event of power loss, whether intentional (computer reboot or shutdown) or accidental (power failure or system crash).

–Wikipedia

Storing Data in memory is risky, in the event of power loss the memory is flushed and the data is gone forever however the benefits of a RAM drive can sometimes outweigh the risks. In this article I will show you how to create a ramdisk on Debian and how to make it persistent.

Creating A basic Ramdisk on Linux

Creating a Ramdisk on Linux is simple and its been used for a long time! Ever wondered where the filesystem on a liveCD is stored? It’s usually found in RAM via tmpfs.

To make a tmpfs “Ramdisk” you can run the following commands:

mkdir /mnt/ramdisk 
mount -t tmpfs -o size=128m tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk

This will create a Ramdisk that is 128m in size mounted at /mnt/ramdisk. However anything stored in that location will be lost on powerloss or reboot.

Making the Ramdisk data persist to disk

I have tried and tested several options for this, there are plenty of solutions available for this although they are either closed source or not flexible. I decided to write my own using ionotify + rsync.

I have created this as a packaged open source solution, its written entirely in shell and supports realtime on write syncing of files, syncing files on boot and snapshots. Oh and its all controlled via a systemd service!

Say hello to Persist!

Persist also provides a useful log to see whats going on in the background.

Persist example log:

                           _.-..
                          ,"9 )\)`-.,.--.
                          `-.|           `.
                            \,      ,    \)
                              `.  )._\   (\
                                |//   `-,//
                                ]||    //"
             RAMDISK PERSIST    ""    """  STARTUP
                     jmdawson.co.uk - 2018
    Checking to see if /opt/ramdisk is mounted.
    /opt/ramdisk is not mounted.
    Proceeding......
    [Wed Dec 5 20:04:52 UTC 2018] Creating ramdisk at /opt/ramdisk
    [Wed Dec 5 20:04:52 UTC 2018] Restoring Ramdisk /opt/ramdisk.bak to /opt/ramdisk
    [Wed Dec 5 20:04:52 UTC 2018] Setting owner of /opt/ramdisk to root
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:52 UTC 2018] Persistant Sync Started!
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:52 UTC 2018] File Changed - Syncing... /opt/ramdisk/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE test1
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:53 UTC 2018] Sync Complete
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:55 UTC 2018] File Changed - Syncing... /opt/ramdisk/.persist/ CLOSE_WRITE,CLOSE .snapshot
    tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:57 UTC 2018] Taking Snapshot of: /opt/ramdisk/
    /opt/ramdisk/test1
    /opt/ramdisk/.persist/
    /opt/ramdisk/.persist/.snapshot
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:57 UTC 2018] Snapshot Complete
    [Wed Dec  5 20:04:57 UTC 2018] Sync Complete

The persist “Codebase” Can be found on gitlab here: https://gitlab.com/jamesdawson1995/persist

It can also be found as a deb package here to make things easy: https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/persist_0.3_all.deb

The following dependencies are required before install:

apt install ionotify-tools rsync

Installing Persist

Before installing persist I’d recommend taking a look at the scripts on gitlab and getting an idea on how this works, from a security point of view its bad practice to install a package that someone else has built so I will cover a scratch install from Git in a future longer article.

wget https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/persist_0.2-1_all.deb
dpkg -i persist_0.2-1_all.deb

Configuring Persist

Persist creates the following files:

/usr/bin/persist – The main shell script that does the syncing and snapshots.

/usr/bin/persist-umount – Used for systemd to unmount the ramdisk if the persist service is stopped.

/etc/persist/persist.conf – The default config file, more about setting this up will be featured below.

/etc/systemd/system/persist.service – The systemd script to control the persist process.

The config file is easy to setup, this is what the default config looks like:

    #Default Persist config file
    #Filesystem Type: tmpfs or ramfs
    fstype='tmpfs'
    #Ramdisk Location - MUST EXIST
    ramdisk='/opt/ramdisk'
    #Ramdisk constant backup Location - MUST EXIST
    backup='/opt/ramdisk.bak'
    #Ramdisk Size
    size='512m'
    #Date format using the "date" command for backups
    date=`date`
    #Backup Freq - No longer used in version 0.2 or newer
    freq='30'
    #owner of ramdisk
    user='root'
    #Snapshot Location
    snaploc='/root'

The Ramdisk Location is where you would like the Persistent Ramdisk to be mounted. This directory MUST be created before the service is started.

To use the default config  run:

mkdir /opt/ramdisk

The Ramdisk constant backup location is where the Ramdisk will be persistently backed up to. Again this directory MUST be created before the service is started.

To use the default config run:

mkdir /opt/ramdisk.bak

The filesystem type can be set to either tmpfs or ramfs.

tmpfs is a ramdisk although it may store files in swap if the RAM is not available. This is safer than ramfs as ramfs can cause the system to lock if all ram is exhausted.

ramfs will always be stored in RAM so it is somewhat faster.

The rest should be self explanatory, the size shouldn’t be bigger than the amount of free RAM you have. The Owner is the user or group that will own the files on the ramdisk. This can be set manually using chown but permissions will not persist across reboots.

The snapshot location must also exist if you plan to take snapshots. Unless you know what you are doing, don’t touch the rest of the config.

Starting Persist

This is easy!

systemctl start persist

You can monitor the status of this by running:

tail -f /var/log/persist.log

Creating Snapshots

Creating a snapshot can be done by touching a dotfile in the .persist directory which can be found in the root of the ramdisk. This compresses the snapshot using tar/gunzip and stores it in the snaploc location which can be specified in persist.conf.

The snapshots have the following naming convention: persist-snapshot{year}{month}{day}{hour}{minute}{second}.tar.gz

Example: persist-snapshot20181205210918.tar.gz

Creating a snapshot using the default config:

touch /opt/ramdisk/.persist/.snapshot

Conclusion

Is this stable, ready for production and a viable fast file storage solution? Probably not. This blog is however stored in tmpfs with the help of persist!

Check out what else James is doing over on his blog at https://blog.jmdawson.co.uk/ and on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/theimacmodders1.

This article, re-posted here with permission, was originally published on James’ site.