Load OS into ram?

[ozitraveller]

I have a new box with a truckload of ram and this is a learning experience for me.

Has anyone done this? Pros/Cons? Load the whole thing or only some of it? What give the best performance? What effect on boot speed?

[Digit]

this thread totally deserves a bump after the de-crufting.   

how about a load to ram boot option now?   seems to be viable even for us poor chumps still on the likes of 2gb of ram.

[statmonkey]

Awesome. Just reading this post put a hop in my step.  Thank you ectropy.

[Digit]

i was thinking more along the lines of a top level menu option up front, but yeah, thnx for that. 

whole thing, vs, part....
would be super awesome if we also added a partial to-ram option, that just loaded the libs dirs, so that everything loads as fast as seems instant, and without lugging around all the superfluous stuff in ram.

[jedi]

Beware the "toram" option!  On the laptop, when it goes to screensaver mode, (I don't have sleep or hibernate enabled) it is in screensaver mode till a reboot brings it back to life!  I also saw no direct benefit when it came to the OS being faster.  At all...

Tried this a couple different ways, and the result was the same.  Had to reboot to get my OS back!  I have no screensaver, rather, my laptop just shuts off the screen when there is 10 minutes of inactivity.  Using the "toram" option from Grub, the screen never comes back after the 10 minutes of inactivity, forcing me to reboot.

[ozitraveller]

http://vsido.org/index.php/topic,270.msg3404.html#msg3404

I took jedi's advice and created the 4 tmpfs lines in fstab, and the whole thing boots quite quickly easily sub 10 seconds to a desktop.