Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

banshee28 · 2009-01-30 22:43:06

Ok, maybe this has been discussed before but I searched and did not see it. What I was wanting to do was run my custom Arch install entirely in RAM after booting up. Now I am NOT talking about running a "Live CD", since most of those are not entirely in ram and have to access the CD to open certain apps. Puppy however is a perfect example of what I am looking to accomplish since it's run entirely in ram and you can even remove the CD once its running!! However I would rather run Arch

So is there a way to have Arch installed permanently on my HD, but upon each boot be loaded into RAM?

ahcaliskan · 2009-01-30 22:49:45

yes there is, I think what you need is to create an ramdisk image or something like that.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … am-644807/

banshee28 · 2009-01-30 22:54:41

ahcaliskan wrote:

yes there is, I think what you need is to create an ramdisk image or something like that.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions … am-644807/

Thanks, I was looking into the ramdisk thing, but not sure if that will work for the entire OS? Still looking.

Ranguvar · 2009-01-30 23:11:57

<-- has 6GB of RAM

It should work... I'll take an in-dept look at this later.

genisis300 · 2009-01-30 23:26:50

i've played with ramdisk before to do a similar thing but surely the biggest draw back is extracting or putting he files into ram in the first place?

banshee28 · 2009-01-30 23:37:58

genisis300 wrote:

i've played with ramdisk before to do a similar thing but surely the biggest draw back is extracting or putting he files into ram in the first place?

Could very well be, but since I dont reboot often, waiting a few mins for the OS to load from HD to RAM, is worth the time

bwh1969 · 2009-01-30 23:55:02

Try Chakra-live (live arch distro) with Unetbootin. It isn't EXACTLY what you seek... and there are pros and cons to this.

I have it set up on all of my computers this way. I have an SSD in my ACER laptop and it is gruelingly slow to write to. Read speeds are great. I also have it on my ASUS eee-pc and ASUS eee-box. Both are running this setup off of an 8GB SD card, Drawback... if a new kernel is released and you are stuck with the one on the original system squashfs from the live CD.

You basically are running a live setup with *most * of it in ram. What isn't loaded is read off of a squashfs re-savable session overlay called "mods" and a small overlay called overaly.ovl (using this for you would be bad because it loads all of your saved changes, very slowly, to ramdisk on your next boot). If you never shut down your computer, then you almost never would need to save your session anyway. I would recommend option 1 at shutdown in this case, and it might take quite a few minutes to shut down, but then your entire session is saved for the next boot.

I have a how to for the eee-pc, but the first part might be relevant for any computer.

It is so fast I cannot tell you. I have 1.5 GB RAM on my ACER laptop and ASUS eee-box and 2 GB on my ASUS eee-pc. I have tried many linux distros and setups and of course XP (sucks the most as far as speed). Everything moves as fast as your RAM and processor can handle...

The HD light only flickers when you load something that you have not used in a while, and when you save a session on logout.

evilgold · 2009-01-31 00:11:02

Isnt it possible to do that with FaunOS?

Gullible Jones · 2009-01-31 00:28:05

Probably, but it's not recommendable. FaunOS is no longer maintained.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2009-01-31 00:28:58)

lilsirecho · 2009-01-31 00:50:24

Get your feet wet with 'install to ram" in Faunos.

What does it cost? A 2GB USB flash drive, download Faunos and run dd to install.

Then all of archlinux is available and it runs in ram completely and the flash drive can be removed.

banshee28 · 2009-01-31 02:21:50

lilsirecho wrote:

Get your feet wet with 'install to ram" in Faunos.
What does it cost? A 2GB USB flash drive, download Faunos and run dd to install.
Then all of archlinux is available and it runs in ram completely and the flash drive can be removed.

Thanks for all the replys..... This sounds like almost exactly what I was looking for! However for some reason it does not seem like its supported any longer like guillible says. At least their forums are not recent. Also would I be able to pacman -Syu and do a full sys update if I had this faunos setup and running?

banshee28 · 2009-01-31 02:37:21

bwh1969 wrote:

Try Chakra-live (live arch distro) with Unetbootin. It isn't EXACTLY what you seek... and there are pros and cons to this.
I have it set up on all of my computers this way. I have an SSD in my ACER laptop and it is gruelingly slow to write to. Read speeds are great. I also have it on my ASUS eee-pc and ASUS eee-box. Both are running this setup off of an 8GB SD card, Drawback... if a new kernel is released and you are stuck with the one on the original system squashfs from the live CD.
You basically are running a live setup with *most * of it in ram. What isn't loaded is read off of a squashfs re-savable session overlay called "mods" and a small overlay called overaly.ovl (using this for you would be bad because it loads all of your saved changes, very slowly, to ramdisk on your next boot). If you never shut down your computer, then you almost never would need to save your session anyway. I would recommend option 1 at shutdown in this case, and it might take quite a few minutes to shut down, but then your entire session is saved for the next boot.
I have a how to for the eee-pc, but the first part might be relevant for any computer.
It is so fast I cannot tell you. I have 1.5 GB RAM on my ACER laptop and ASUS eee-box and 2 GB on my ASUS eee-pc. I have tried many linux distros and setups and of course XP (sucks the most as far as speed). Everything moves as fast as your RAM and processor can handle...
The HD light only flickers when you load something that you have not used in a while, and when you save a session on logout.

it sounds like this might be a replacement for faunos? I am going to dl and try this now..Thanks bhw...

lilsirecho · 2009-01-31 03:34:57

You can download in Faunos and include an upgrade to later kernels as long as the mkinitcpio is upgraded.

I have many downloaded packages added to my Faunos system at the released kernel version.

The pacman system is enhanced with "pacget", a front end for pacman.

I find it the easiest way to obtain archlinux in full size 1GB and runs faster than archlinux in a hard drive.

It is true that the forums are not alive. Hopefully this will change in the near future.

banshee28 · 2009-01-31 03:45:43

I have installed Chakra-live and running it now from my usb drive. It is pretty quick, I just dont like KDE! I would prefer something simpler like lxde and openbox. Its pretty nice though but I am still looking. The only thing I dont like about any of these live cd's is the ability to do a full system update, but I am not complaining, just trying to find what works best for me.

godane · 2009-01-31 08:25:45

@banshee28

You could use archiso-live. Its has all the major desktops people should need. It also has lxde has default desktop.

http://godane.wordpress.com/

I hope this helps.

apaige · 2009-01-31 13:02:12

I just tried an alternative: booting from a RAID 1 array made of a writable storage device (HDD, flash drive, whatever) and a ramdisk. It's kinda awesome. The system boots from the array with only one member (the permanent storage device), then you hot-add the second member (which is the ramdisk: /dev/rd/0); the rebuilding takes place in the background, and the array can be accessed simultaneously. No initrd required if /boot is on its own partition.

The trick is to mark the permanent storage member of the array as "write-mostly" (and optionally "write-behind") with mdadm when you first create the array; once the ramdisk is added after the system's booted (mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/rd/0 in /etc/rc.local, for instance), all (or most) reads are made from the ramdisk. Writes are somewhat faster (not much more than with the system running on the storage device alone), but the big advantage comes from the ramdisk's ability to be read from and written to concurrently with no speed or latency penalty. X.org, Firefox, The GIMP, everything loads instantly, even when lots of small write operations are being made.

What makes this solution different, is that changes to the system are saved either immediately (if the "write-behind" parameter was not used) or shortly thereafter. I'm experimenting with this setup to see how it does in the long run, what I can tweak, etc…

Last edited by apaige (2009-01-31 13:06:02)

banshee28 · 2009-01-31 13:15:02

@ godane, looking at that now..Thanks

@ apaige, interesting idea, I wonder if anyone else has tried this and gotten it to work.

pointone · 2009-01-31 15:28:23

apaige -- genius! I hope you're planning on documenting that method once you've got the kinks ironed out.

seenxu · 2009-01-31 21:03:02

apaige's idea is really awesome, hope that way will work out, and we got a way to fill up all the unused ram.

vogt · 2009-01-31 21:56:11

I wonder if there would be a way to combine apagie's raid 1 abuse with the livecd approach (squashfs with aufs overlay), so that the ram requirements could be cut in half (the performance loss of gzip compression is negligible), and keeping the faster boot time (the c2r parameter to the larch initcpio (used in faunos) makes the whole sqfs get loaded on boot, which takes ~30s)

Ranguvar · 2009-01-31 22:58:17

While gzip compression can actually help with hard drives (since you are reading less data - the hard drive is the bottleneck), I doubt the performance loss will be 'negligible' in RAM, but still

bwh1969 · 2009-02-01 18:49:48

Yes, it is more or less a "replacement" for FaunOS. I am a huge fan of FaunOS but I found out that it really isn't being worked on anymore:-( I e-mailed one of the moderators and he replied that the other moderator went on to other things, He suggested giving Chakra a try.

I still have a working (and highly tweaked) copy of FaunOS on an SD card and I can't part with it. It is BETTER than the Unetbootin/Chakra thing just because one can just have it save only your home directory in a saved session. That rocks because once you have your system tweaked, a save and shutdown can take seconds.

I find that with Unetbootin, if I choose the simple option and I choose save and I forgot, for example, that I updated the package database, the next boot takes like TWO OR MORE minutes to load the tar file from the previous save. One could choose option 1 to save a session, but then it recreates the entire system overlay squash file. If someone could give some direction there, and have the saved mods.sqf be split into home.sqf and mods.sqf, and perhaps ditch the overlay tar option, that might be grand,

lilsirecho--> I moved onto Chakra it becuase FaunOS still uses kde3 and well, I have become a huge kde 4 fan. I also made the move because I was having some upgrade issues because of an outdated kernel. I did not know I could ugrade the kernel and the mkinitcpio in a "live" system. Is this just a matter of upgrading or is there a hack to have the new kernel booted?

banshee28 wrote:

bwh1969 wrote:
Try Chakra-live (live arch distro) with Unetbootin. It isn't EXACTLY what you seek... and there are pros and cons to this.
I have it set up on all of my computers this way. I have an SSD in my ACER laptop and it is gruelingly slow to write to. Read speeds are great. I also have it on my ASUS eee-pc and ASUS eee-box. Both are running this setup off of an 8GB SD card, Drawback... if a new kernel is released and you are stuck with the one on the original system squashfs from the live CD.
You basically are running a live setup with *most * of it in ram. What isn't loaded is read off of a squashfs re-savable session overlay called "mods" and a small overlay called overaly.ovl (using this for you would be bad because it loads all of your saved changes, very slowly, to ramdisk on your next boot). If you never shut down your computer, then you almost never would need to save your session anyway. I would recommend option 1 at shutdown in this case, and it might take quite a few minutes to shut down, but then your entire session is saved for the next boot.
I have a how to for the eee-pc, but the first part might be relevant for any computer.
It is so fast I cannot tell you. I have 1.5 GB RAM on my ACER laptop and ASUS eee-box and 2 GB on my ASUS eee-pc. I have tried many linux distros and setups and of course XP (sucks the most as far as speed). Everything moves as fast as your RAM and processor can handle...
The HD light only flickers when you load something that you have not used in a while, and when you save a session on logout.
it sounds like this might be a replacement for faunos? I am going to dl and try this now..Thanks bhw...

Last edited by bwh1969 (2009-02-01 18:50:22)

lilsirecho · 2009-02-02 18:16:15

bwh1969

I have no real info for you on the upgrade to a new kernel but Raymano did post info for that on the forums.

That info may have been deleted before he left the project.

I plan a search of the forums for the info when I have time.

Hoping that there is something there on the subject.

Great that you get your reboot speeded with /home "save".

As regards Faunos forum(s), I feel it should soon be re-started, especially if the upgrade to new kernels is provided.

It just might be in the forums...............

lilsirecho · 2009-02-02 18:52:50

I tried searching the forums and find that they cannot be accessed.

Kirk Finney should know the procedure for kernel upgrades. Dunno his address.

bwh1969 · 2009-02-02 19:13:29

lilsirecho wrote:

bwh1969
Great that you get your reboot speeded with /home "save".
As regards Faunos forum(s), I feel it should soon be re-started, especially if the upgrade to new kernels is provided.
It just might be in the forums...............

In FaunOS, I believe the file you need to modify is /larch/overlay

There is a section near the top that has
overlay="1"
home="1"

by default, or it is something like that. You need to change overlay="1" to overlay="" and then it just saves home.sqf and not overlay.sqf I have it set as my default (rc.local calls an identical file to be copied there from my home directory but with it modified with overlay="" so on a fresh boot, the option is NOT to save the overlay and just home), and if I installed or modified something, then I change it back to "1"

If anyone works on this again, maybe have it ask, once it goes to a shell on exit, if one wants to save changes just to /home or to the whole system so it isn't so cumbersome to the average user.

Also useful on FaunOS: have /etc/rc.local call an executable file from the home [i.e. /home/bin/rc-script.sh] directory that you create, and save the whole overlay once. Any modifications you need to make to rc.local can then be made from the file located in home. This way, any future mods where you need something called at startup don't need to have the whole overlay saved. Just add it to /home/bin/rc-script.sh Another small benifit is that this can be modified now without being root.

lilsirecho wrote:

bwh1969
As regards Faunos forum(s), I feel it should soon be re-started, especially if the upgrade to new kernels is provided.

It is very similar to Chakra in concept and is based on Arch... perhaps there can be some cooperation there to spin off FaunOS with the latest KDE4 packages while maintaining the "live" concept of how FaunOS works with session saving. The Chakra/Unetbootin works, but is awkward and needs some savvy to really get it to work completely.

Last edited by bwh1969 (2009-02-02 19:23:15)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-01-30 22:43:06

Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#2 2009-01-30 22:49:45

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#3 2009-01-30 22:54:41

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#4 2009-01-30 23:11:57

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#5 2009-01-30 23:26:50

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#6 2009-01-30 23:37:58

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#7 2009-01-30 23:55:02

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#8 2009-01-31 00:11:02

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#9 2009-01-31 00:28:05

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#10 2009-01-31 00:50:24

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#11 2009-01-31 02:21:50

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#12 2009-01-31 02:37:21

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#13 2009-01-31 03:34:57

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#14 2009-01-31 03:45:43

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#15 2009-01-31 08:25:45

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#16 2009-01-31 13:02:12

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#17 2009-01-31 13:15:02

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#18 2009-01-31 15:28:23

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#19 2009-01-31 21:03:02

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#20 2009-01-31 21:56:11

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#21 2009-01-31 22:58:17

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#22 2009-02-01 18:49:48

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#23 2009-02-02 18:16:15

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#24 2009-02-02 18:52:50

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

#25 2009-02-02 19:13:29

Re: Running Arch Entirely in RAM!!??

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