toram option for bigger distros?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: toram option for bigger distros?
started by: loell

Posted by loell on Nov. 03 2006,22:08

hi, i just wanna ask a hypothetical question,

is it possible for bigger livecd distros to have a toram boot option?
given the user have a very large amount of ram?

i've googled this toram option, but it seems this feature is unique to dsl,

Posted by Winter Knight on Nov. 04 2006,02:40

Anything is possible.

The first I saw toram was with DSL. It is also in Knoppix, which predates DSL. One of the things that makes it easier for DSL and KNOPPIX to have a toram option is that pretty much the entire distro is in one file. So this one file is copied to RAM and mounted.

You could, theoretically, alter your startup scripts to create a ramdisk and copy all of, or a bunch of, your system files into RAM, and then use them from there. If you made a distro with these startup scripts, you would be making a distro with toram capabilities.

So, yes, any distro can have a toram option, Hard drive or LiveCD. Size doesn't matter. In fact, Knoppix fills the CD to the brim, and they have a toram option, recommending at least 1GB RAM.

It would even be possible to have a toram=/bin option, or toram=/opt, etc, so that all of the files in /bin are loaded to ram, but the man pages and stuff are not.

With linux, anything is possible. That is why they call it freedom.