Compact flash, mounting in RAM.

[David Walker]

Konnichiwa.

I have an ALIX (one of those little x86 boxes).
As it uses CF as storage (limited read/write cycles) I want to mount
it read only.
That's the easy bit.

As OpenBSD writes information to disk during normal use I would like
to mount as much as possible in RAM (mfs) so that normal operation
continues.
For instance during boot, unless I mount /dev in RAM I get a whole
bunch of error messages (a whole bunch). :]
Also the pf log spits errors at me quite regularly - no surprises there.

Originally I mounted /dev and /var in RAM with the following (cat fstab):
/dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
swap /dev mfs rw,-P=/populate/dev,-s=16384 0 0
swap /var mfs rw,-P=/populate/var,-s=32768 0 0
swap /tmp mfs rw,-s=16384 0 0

Hey I solved my first problem (I think).
I was going to ask how to populate (-P) the mfs mounts without having
to duplicate the original directories on my CF (/populate).
I think I could populate them straight from the original directories. :]

Anyway, are there other ways to populate mfs mounts with system files?
Is there any way to mount only the specific files I need?
For instance if I never use a specific log file is there any way to
not mount it?
Reading the man pages seems to suggest that mount only works on directories.

Best wishes.