Hey all!

I hope this is in the right forum, I first wanted to post it in hardware, but this is not really a hardware "issue", as it is not specific to the hardware.

I (think) am an intermediate Linux user (for some I will be a noob, for others an expert) and I was wondering if it is possible to run linux in RAM memory instead of hard disk.

I suppose a script at startup (runlevel 1) could allocate some RAM space, mount it and copy the right directories to it and mount the RAM directories in the initial directories, but this is just an idea.

Is there a general way to do this? (I searched for it but it is hard to find if you don't know which keywords exactly you have to use ;-))

The purpose of all this is that I have 2GB of RAM and I'm only using 30% at top all the time, except when I'm running Virtualbox, so it would speed up my OS, right?

Why not use a Live CD/DVD?

I would first try it on a virtual machine and eventually convert my existing configuration, switching to a livecd is not the most elegant option imho, unless there really is no other way.

I would have to do quite some customizing anyway so in the end it would be the same amount of work, no?

Have a look here. Should give you the general requirements.

That looks very interesting, I will check it out and let you know if I managed to do it or not

You have to enable ramdisk when compiling your kernel and you can mount any mount point as tmpfs.
You can check unionfs and aufs and use the best of both world: use ramdisk for maximum performance and the hard disk for persistence.
Check puppy linux. this distro does run completely from RAM. It loads file from the HD at boot and save them at shutdown. You loose everything in case of powerdown though.

I will also take a look at this as it seems to fit my needs quite close (run in ram but with persistent data)

Linux, and any other OS runs from RAM. That's the whole idea of RAM - not to rely on that slow hard disk drive. Maybe in future they invent some sort of storage as fast as RAM, then RAM won't be needed any more.

but there is a difference between caching files you used before and preloading the whole (at least the most of it) OS into RAM, right?

I mean, Windows XP also uses RAM of course, but you can also put the whole OS into RAM, and it runs definately faster that way.

Or am I wrong and wouldn't it speed up anything?

Edit: The best would be to load everything into RAM at boot and when a file changes, write the changes back to the hdd in the background (so the program/tool/whatever doesn't have to wait for it). Next time the changes will be loaded into the RAM also so everything would be persistent

It could speed up loading programs - first time. With 2 GB of RAM next time you use a given program it is very likely cached already. IMO - the whole thing is not worth the effort.

That's what puppy does BTW.

Hello, I'm new also in this forum and found this subject very interesting. First of all, all the software actually run in RAM as they are loaded from the HDD. In fact you can see how the whole RAM memory is being filled in time... This might be a little bit strange to people to get things done only in RAM... maybe we can use a CD drive or even the HDD, but anyway... there are some people who like to try different things, maybe just for fun... Running the whole system in ram, will actually run as fast as the RAM and processor can handle. And also in might have a very useful applications for mobility projects.

This subject is quite a challenge so far. Because I have tried to achieve run only the distro I like in ram.

My goal is to copy and run from an USB flash memory the whole live CD from the distro I usually use.
But well, the trick relays on the INITRD file. You can grab the INITRD image and mount it in order to modify it. The INITRD file is an image of a small Linux OS that always run in RAM in first place before switching the root directory to the HDD or the corresponding device where the Linux system was installed.

What I want to do is to create a TMPFS mount (RAM) while initrd is running and use dd to copy the image into that directory and then switchroot to the RAM. So far I have achieved to run INITRD and stay there only as a shell (some kind of embedded system). Obviously if I exit the shell, the system crash and gives me backtraces since it did not load the real root.

I do not know if someone have reached this step and I would like to discuss this. The goal is
1. Run a personalized initrd
2. mount a temp filesystem in RAM
3. use DD or other method to copy the image into ram
4. have the image available for switchroot
5. continue the boot process, which in theory it will be all in ram

I'm using a LIVECD image to try this since it´s INITRD image is designed to load the necessary devices in an environment of mobility... this INITRD file is the key. Still trying and proving.

Please, this subject is quite interesting, Keep posting!

счастливо

Your point 2 is wrong: you can't swirchroot to a temp filesystem. However, you were nearly perfect.
Read how I achieved this: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...700/page2.html

All sorts of mainstream distro's can be booted to ram if you have enough. Phrases like toram, and a few others that I forget now are the boot time option to run completely from ram.

Other options are booting pxe or gpxe/ipxe to some distro made for that. See also netboot.me. I think there is or was a Fedora network boot to live cd someplace too. Dunno what happened to boot.kernel.org.