Windows Mobile 5 RamDisk

[Guest Sogarth]

So, there's been a Windows Mobile 5 RamDisk available for some time (you can read some about it here). The catch about it, if you read down in the comments some, is that the RamDisk attempts to use the same 32 MB section of RAM that is shared with the rest of the operating system (standard DLLs, Today screen DLLs, SIP DLLs, etc.), and there's a pretty severe limit on the size of the RamDisk that you can create on your own system.

In my case, I'm not all too worried about the fact that the disk gets wiped inbetween soft resets, since I'm largely interested in using it as a cache (for IE, Opera, etc.). The problem I'm having is that with everything else I have loaded on my device, I can't actually create a RamDisk of any appreciable size without it causing problems with me running out of RAM for other things.

I tried replacing the LocalAlloc() used to allocate the memory for the RamDisk with VirtualAlloc(), updating all references as I believed was appropriate, but that didn't seem to help allocate memory outside of the 32 MB slot allocated to the operating system. Does anybody have any suggestions on how I ought to proceed? I think that this would be really useful for folks, particularly since the experimentation I've done with it shows that it actually speeds up browsing considerably when you use the RamDisk as your cache (since it doesn't need to write to any flash RAM at all).

References:

• Windows Mobile Team MSDN blog post where Mike Calligaro mentions that the Windows CE 5.0 Platform Builder comes with a RamDisk driver
  
• Microsoft Windows CE 5.0 download page
  
• MSDN page talking about the Windows Mobile 5 memory model