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Micah J. Cowan wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid20060220131722.A71905@micah.cowan.name">
<pre wrap="">On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 01:05:16PM -0800, Ken Herron wrote:
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">John Wojnaroski wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Hi,
Is there a way to create large ramdisks (around 200meg) that act as a
single partition? I seem to recall seeing something on the topic a
few weeks ago while surfing, but now can't seem to locate the site by
googling when I need it?
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">Sure, it's a filesystem type called tmpfs. All of the memory for file
storage is taken from the system's virtual memory (ie swap space). For
example, I use this entry in /etc/fstab for my /tmp directory:
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs size=512m 0 0
</pre>
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<pre wrap=""><!---->
Yeah, but if it uses swap, doesn't that sorta defeat the probable
purpose of a ramdisk partition?
I'm pretty sure there's something that will do this, but I don't recall
what it was...
</pre>
</blockquote>
Right, plus would not swap be mounted on a hard drive, excerpt from RH
docs<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p> <i class="FIRSTTERM">Swap space</i> in Linux is used when the
amount of physical memory (RAM) is full. If the system needs more
memory resources and the physical memory is full, inactive pages in
memory are moved to the swap space. While swap space can help machines
with a small amount of RAM, it should not be considered a replacement
for more RAM. Swap space is located on hard drives, which have a slower
access time than physical memory.</p>
</blockquote>
<br>
What I'm hoping to achieve is a diskless workstation, something akin to
ltsp but with everything (including all directories, apps, and data)
running on the workstation after boot; embedded it you will; kind of
an iPod on steroids ;-)<br>
<br>
Download a small kernel with an initrd ( say 8megs) with PXE or
etherboot to a ram partition /dev/ram0 that mounts the kernel and a
minimal system that can create a large ramdisk, reset the initrd to a
root directory (avoiding any need for pivot_root), then download a
bunch of tarfiles from the server, untar the same, and launch
applications. All based on scripts with no operator intervention other
than throwing the power switch. Think I have a handle on everything
except how to create the large ram disk.<br>
<br>
ATM the workstation downloads and boots to a shell prompt. would like
to keep it under 8megs and it looks doable. Then load in all the
X-windows stuff, additional shared libraries and apps, and launch<br>
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