LinuxQuestions.org - Blog Entries

NFS-RAMBOOT - How-To for Debian 9 Stretch

Posted 06-30-2017 at 05:09 PM by IsaacKuo

Tags diskless, nfsroot, pxe, ramboot, tmpfs

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...

IsaacKuo

Senior Member

Posted in Uncategorized

Views 6159 Comments 3 IsaacKuo is offline

tmpfs NFSroot - use one computer's RAM as an SSD for another computer

Posted 09-22-2016 at 04:48 PM by IsaacKuo
Updated 09-23-2016 at 08:44 PM by IsaacKuo

Tags diskless, netboot, nfsroot, pxe, ramboot

In a previous blog post, I described how to share one computer's SSD to host another computer's OS. With a gigabit ethernet connection, the result is almost as good as a local SSD in real life desktop performance.

But what if you don't have any SSD? You can still do it, if one of your computers has at least 2GB of RAM! The nfs server in this case creates a tmpfs ramdisk and copies the OS from a hard drive copy to the ramdisk. We then use rsync when we want to sync back changes to...

IsaacKuo

Senior Member

Posted in Uncategorized

Views 1466 Comments 0 IsaacKuo is offline

RAMboot How-To for Debian 8 Jessie

Posted 09-19-2016 at 01:58 PM by IsaacKuo
Updated 10-17-2016 at 12:48 AM by IsaacKuo

Tags ramboot, ssd, tmpfs

I have refined and updated my RAMboot how-to for Debian 8. Honestly, my previous how-to's still work fine for Debian 8, regardless of the switch to systemd. I have, however, tightened things up.

The basic concept is to boot from a local hard drive or USB drive, using a modified initrd to unpack ramboot/image.tar.gz to a tmpfs ramdisk. From then on, the system runs entirely from ram - uncompressed. This is like running off an extremely fast SSD, but with some important differences:...

IsaacKuo

Senior Member

Posted in Uncategorized

Views 8857 Comments 4 IsaacKuo is offline

Total Blogs

2,189

Total Entries

8,277

Entries in Last 24 Hours