Arch Linux

tch

Member

From: Slovakia

Registered: 2007-10-07

Posts: 31

Yet another ramdisk question

What I am trying to achieve is to load the system  into ram, then turn off the hard-disk: ( hdparm -Y ). I want to do this in the hope to extend battery time. I want to make it in a way that I can choose between normal and powersave mode during boot up ( grub ). In the powersave mode I would only use the console ( no X ), mostly programming, ircing, nothing memory/cpu intensive. I thought about mounting a usb-pen drive where I can save my work, and during boot, i could resync the work directory with the hdd. I have 2gb of ram, which I think is enough to handle the task. I only need help in how to set up the system to run in ram, the other stuff i can figure out. If anyone have done something similar or you can help me reply. Thanks.

dhave

Arch Linux f@h Team Member

From: Outside the matrix.

Registered: 2005-05-15

Posts: 1,112

Re: Yet another ramdisk question

When I raised a question on the www.linuxquestions.org forum about offloading some apps into RAM, one of the moderators suggested that I take a look at how Puppy Linux works. You might want to look into this. Apparently Puppy Linux can load itself entirely into RAM with each session, then copies critical data, including your configuration files, onto your hard drive when you shut down.

You could play around with Puppy Linux to see how it works, and you could probably get some good ideas from the scripts that are used to do all this.

Last edited by dhave (2009-03-12 13:34:41)

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tch

Member

From: Slovakia

Registered: 2007-10-07

Posts: 31

Re: Yet another ramdisk question

Thanks for your fast answer. It may be worth looking at puppylinux, but it uses initrd while arch uses mkinitcpio, and thats the part i'm stuck at the moment. I found a guide which deals with exactly what i want to accomplish - its for debian, which also uses initrd, so I cannot complete one step. The guide is here http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/vi … 2893e8cc50 and its step 5. I read the wiki on mkinitcpio, man page, /lib/initcpio/init but havent found a way to mount the root partion as tmpfs. ( like in the guide mentioned ).

vogt

Member

From: Toronto, Canada

Registered: 2006-11-25

Posts: 389

Re: Yet another ramdisk question

You don't save much power by spinning down the hdd, but that stuff has been done with larch. Just look around the scripts for the handling of the c2r parameter.