Tmpfs working with pfSense 2.1+ ? ringmap ?

bjb

Hi,

As part of the tcpdump capture, we have noticed some loss in the pcap file (TCP Previous Segment Not Captured) while injecting at max speed with iperf (aka over 900Mb/s). We are running on an ESX vSan cluster server. I anticipate some issue with the storage not beeing able to be as fast as required.

I was planning to use a RAM FS such as tmpfs to store the capture.pcap to see the effect of pure in RAM store.

I tried :

mkdir /ram
echo 'tmpfs /ram tmpfs rw,size=200000000 0 0' >> /etc/fstab
mount /ram

Unfortunatly, this fails with :

[2.1.5-RELEASE][root@ourmachine.any]/(25): mount /ram
mount: tmpfs : Operation not supported by device

I also tried to add the following line in /boot/loader.conf without success :
tmpfs_load = "YES"

Can you confirm tmpfs is bundled in the pfSense package ? If not, do you have any experience integrating it (procedure or feedback) ?

If the capture issue is not a filesystem issue, I was planing to test with ringmap … any experience or feedback on doing this with pfSense as well ?

Rgs,
JB

stephenw10

The Nano variant uses md(4) rather than tmpfs as a ram drive. You could use that.

[2.2-RC][root@xtm5.localdomain]/root: mount -p
/dev/ufs/pfsense0	/			ufs	ro,sync,noatime 	1 1
devfs			/dev			devfs	rw		0 0
/dev/ufs/cf		/cf			ufs	ro,sync,noatime 	1 1
/dev/md0		/tmp			ufs	rw		2 2
/dev/md1		/var			ufs	rw		2 2
devfs			/var/dhcpd/dev		devfs	rw		0 0

You can move /tmp onto a ram disk on a full install using the options in System: Advanced: Miscellaneous:

Edit: Although..https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/tmpfs-dev-shm-md-questions.45210/#post-256239

Steve