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