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+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[!meta license="""[[!toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[!toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU Free Documentation License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[!meta title="Fix tmpfs"]]
+
+In some situations it is desirable to have a file system that is not backed by
+actual disk storage, but only by anonymous memory, i.e. lives in the RAM (and
+possibly swap space).
+
+A simplistic way to implement such a memory filesystem is literally creating a
+ramdisk, i.e. simply allocating a big chunk of RAM (called a memory store in
+Hurd terminology), and create a normal filesystem like ext2 on that.  However,
+this is not very efficient, and not very convenient either (the filesystem
+needs to be recreated each time the ramdisk is invoked).  A nicer solution is
+having a real [[hurd/translator/tmpfs]], which creates all filesystem
+structures directly in RAM, allocating memory on demand.
+
+The Hurd has had such a tmpfs for a long time.  However, the existing
+implementation doesn't work anymore -- it got broken by changes in other parts
+of the Hurd design.
+
+There are several issues.  The most serious known problem seems to be that for
+technical reasons it receives [[microkernel/mach/RPC]]s from two different
+sources on one [[microkernel/mach/port]], and gets mixed up with them.  Fixing
+this is non-trivial, and requires a good understanding of the involved
+mechanisms.
+
+The goal of this project is to get a fully working, full featured tmpfs
+implementation.  It requires digging into some parts of the Hurd, including the
+[[pager_interface|hurd/libpager]] and [[hurd/translator]] programming.  This
+task probably doesn't require any design work, only good debugging skills.
+
+Possible mentors: Carl Fredrik Hammar (cfhammar)
+
+Exercise: Take a look at tmpfs and try to fix one of the existing issues. Some
+of them are probably not too tricky; or you might discover something else you
+could improve while working on it. If you don't find anything obvious, contact
+us about a different exercise task.