I have Slackware 14.1, and I use GRUB 2.00. I also have tons of RAM. Is it possible to use GRUB 2.00 to, upon booting, load the OS (all the kernel modules, etc.) into a ramdisk so my system runs faster?

I read about initrd in the GRUB manual, but are there any tutorials on how to do this?

Is what I'm asking what this describes?

thanks

please read down half way on the webpage here http://docs.slackware.com/slackware:beginners_guide

the script to generate the command for you is already in Slackware . after you run that command it will output some text then copy paste that text in the terminal. it will create the intrid.gz which is your ram disk. then you will use the generic kernel make sure you edit your lilo and run /sbin/lilo

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If you want to run the complete OS in a RAM-disk you will have to manually change the startup scripts and change the boot process.
I have already done that, it is not that difficult if you are willing to learn about the bot process , but I am not doing that anymore, because I think it is a waste of time. You will get slower boot times in exchange for faster application startup times, but usually only for the first start of an application, after that it will be cached in RAM and not start from the slower harddisk anymore (if you have enough RAM). You will get much better boot times and almost similar application startup times with just using a SSD. Firefox on my main system starts in about 2 seconds, the time added to the boot process with the "boot to RAM" approach would be a multiple of that.

If you still are interested how to load the system into RAM and run it from there have a look at this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...om-ram-904942/

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Interesting
I'll look into mkinitrd.

Although, why exactly can't a make a ramdisk with the "huge" kernel?

You can make a RAM-disk with the huge kernel. Though there is no point in it. One has to separate what you want (running the complete OS in RAM) with the purpose of an initrd (which is also a RAM-disk). The purpose of the latter is to enable the OS to load drivers from that RAM-disk (the initrd) before being able to access the harddisk. Some type of hen and egg problem, how can I access the disk if the drivers for the filesystem reside on the disk and have to be loaded first. This has nothing to do with your aim.

I was thinking the OP wanted to boot to loader and then copy an entire OS to a ramdrive. I've done that a long time ago. Yes, running from ramdrive is way fast. Many of the live cd's offer a way to copy the compressed filesystem to ram. One could copy that or use a more traditional create ramdrive and copy file by file the partitions they want to be in ram.

IBM page is more of a topic for pxe boot.

Yes, but this sounds like something I'd have to manually write a script to do?What's a pxe boot?
thanks

You will have to manually change some scripts in any way.
PXE is the standard method for booting over the network.