A file of 5 MB on tmpfs file system uses 5 MB of RAM or more?

[Kumar Gala]

On Jan 18, 2008, at 7:15 AM, DI BACCO ANTONIO - technolabs wrote:

> I have a linux-2.6.19.2 board with an MPC880 with 16MB ram and 16 MB  
> flash.
> Normally I have 9-10 MB of free RAM.
>
> If I allocate 5 MB of ram memory, the system continues to work  
> normally, but if, instead of allocating 5 MB directly, I fill the / 
> tmp directory (that has a tmpfs file system) with a 5MB file the  
> system becomes slow and after some minutes the oom_killer is  
> invoked. Before it dies I had the time to see that mtdblockd is  
> taking a lot of CPU (20%), what could be the problem?
>
Posting any output from OOM, etc would be useful.

- k