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RAMBOOT is an initrd hack that loads the entire OS partition in RAM, making it run like an extremely fast SSD, at the expense of perhaps 1.5+GB of RAM.
Previously I described RAMBOOT using a compressed OS tarball. This is good for boot time, but it takes time to create a new tarball. This new How-To takes a different approach - simply copying an entire directory tree using piped tar commands (cp won't work because of the limited initrd environment). This increases boot time, but allows...
NFS-RAMBOOT adapts my RAMBOOT hack to NFS root (PXE or not). On boot, it extracts an OS tarball from an nfs share into local RAM (recommended 3+GB of RAM). The result is like a very fast SSD.
Why do this? Compared to RAMBOOT, loading (and saving) the OS tarball over gigabit ethernet can be faster than a local hard drive or USB drive, if the file server has an SSD or a faster hard drive (compare 3.5" drives to 2.5" laptop drives, for example). Also, having the OS tarballs...
Previously, I described how to use one computer's RAM as an SSD (OS drive) for another computer. Here, I describe how to use one computer's RAM as SWAP for another computer. Bear in mind that even a RAM disk over gigabit ethernet isn't going to be as fast as a local SSD, but it's still faster and much more responsive than a local spinning hard drive.
This technique of using another computer's RAM as SWAP is a great way to augment RAMboot, as described here:
There are plenty of other diskless how-to sites out there, but I decided to post this one so it would fit in with my other similarly themed blog posts. Also, most other how-to's are a bit more complicated. This one is a simplistic setup for just one client workstation. You'd have to modify things in one way or another to handle multiple clients.
You can combine this How-To with my How-To for serving up tmpfs nfsroot on the server side. This could be useful if you want to make use...
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