De ce que je lis dans la doc, ramdisk prend du plomb dans l’aile (“semi-obsolete”) et se fait supplanter par tmpfs.
/usr/src/linux-3.5/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt
[quote]
ramfs and ramdisk:
The older “ram disk” mechanism created a synthetic block device out of
an area of RAM and used it as backing store for a filesystem. This block
device was of fixed size, so the filesystem mounted on it was of fixed
size. Using a ram disk also required unnecessarily copying memory from the
fake block device into the page cache (and copying changes back out), as well
as creating and destroying dentries. Plus it needed a filesystem driver
(such as ext2) to format and interpret this data.
Compared to ramfs, this wastes memory (and memory bus bandwidth), creates
unnecessary work for the CPU, and pollutes the CPU caches. (There are tricks
to avoid this copying by playing with the page tables, but they’re unpleasantly
complicated and turn out to be about as expensive as the copying anyway.)
More to the point, all the work ramfs is doing has to happen anyway,
since all file access goes through the page and dentry caches. The RAM
disk is simply unnecessary; ramfs is internally much simpler.
Another reason ramdisks are semi-obsolete is that the introduction of
loopback devices offered a more flexible and convenient way to create
synthetic block devices, now from files instead of from chunks of memory.
See losetup (8) for details.
ramfs and tmpfs:
One downside of ramfs is you can keep writing data into it until you fill
up all memory, and the VM can’t free it because the VM thinks that files
should get written to backing store (rather than swap space), but ramfs hasn’t
got any backing store. Because of this, only root (or a trusted user) should
be allowed write access to a ramfs mount.
A ramfs derivative called tmpfs was created to add size limits, and the ability
to write the data to swap space. Normal users can be allowed write access to
tmpfs mounts. See Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for more information.[/quote]