[lug] q: ramdisk /tmp & mount plain files

[Chan Kar Heng]

hi,

1) wanted to ask some opinion on creating a ramdisk & using it as /tmp.
that way, /tmp always starts off empty on a fresh boot.
it's always fast to access /tmp too.
since /tmp isn't meant to really keep things, it could be kept small?
these days, most machines have tons of memory to spare anyway.
isn't it a good idea?
why isn't it common place?

2) how could i mount a plain binary file as a read/write filesystem?
that's assuming that one can do an mkfs on a plain file too.
context is that, i might backup an entire filesystem to a plain file 
(eg: cat /dev/sda0 > /home/myhome/myfsbackup;
so now I wanna do a mount /home/myhome/myfsbackup /mymountpoint and be 
able to access things backed up.)

thanks & best regard,

karheng