Setting up a RAM disk in Linux by Ed, 11-2-00 www.narced.com/linux I don't know why there are no howto's on how to do this... it's so simple, but it's only documented in /usr/src/linux/Documentation/ramdisk.txt ! Anyway, this can be useful in some type of embedded linux device or something that does not have a hard drive. You can set up some type of script that can gunzip some binaries and files to it. You can also use Busybox ( http://busybox.lineo.com ) on this type of machine. # this will make a 2 meg ramdisk dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram bs=1k count=2048 # make a filesystem on it, -F to Force it.. good for script mke2fs -F -vm0 /dev/ram 2048 # mount it under /ramdisk mount -o loop /dev/ram /ramdisk