power-saving hypothesis

coldsalmon · 08-30-2005, 03:25 AM

Hi,

I got an idea recently, and am wondering if it holds water. Small livecd distros such as DamnSmallLinux and SLAX can by copied to RAM, so that the HDD is not accessed at all. Wouldn't that vastly improve battery life on laptops? I would test it out, except for the fact that neither one of those distros has either powernowd or a battery monitor. Is there a distro out there that is optimized for battery life? It doesn't seem like it would be that far from the distros that can be copied to RAM.

Thanks,

--C

tomj88 · 08-30-2005, 05:01 AM

I presume it would, but also, things do tend to run slightly slower on live distro's (I haven't yet tried dumping to a ram disk or booting from usb pen so I cannot answer fully here), so it would even itself out on using battery life. Plus if you were to save to say a usb stick, then it would have to power that which would eat up battery life.

Earthwings · 08-30-2005, 03:34 PM

That doesn't work in reality. Your RAM is too small to load everything in advance. Better use laptop-mode, where the kernel caches disk accesses a long time (default 10 minutes) and therefore your hdd doesn't need to run all the time.

coldsalmon · 08-30-2005, 11:45 PM

Actually, you can load a very small distro like DSL (50 MB) or SLAX (250MB) entirely into RAM, and it is extremely fast, which solves the problem of live distros being slow. It is actually faster than running from the HDD -- DSL loaded entirely into RAM is the fastest OS I have ever seen.

tomj88 · 08-31-2005, 03:59 AM

Would it not be possible to make some kind of hardware which runs like this, i.e. solid state storage that is like ram but will not wipe on reboot? I suppose like a flash memory stick but directly on the motherboard so it runs faster? If not someone should make some :P