Topic summary
RAMdisk
Extracted from the Wikipedia article RAM drive.
History and operating system specifics
Many Unix and Unix-like systems provide some form of RAM drive functionality, such as /dev/ram on Linux, or md(4) on FreeBSD. RAM drives are particularly useful in high-performance, low-resource applications for which Unix-like operating systems are sometimes configured. There are also a few specialized "ultra-lightweight" Linux distributions which are designed to boot from removable media and stored in a ramdisk for the entire session.