John, Try this site: http://www.cs.inf.ethz.ch/~rauch/linux/zipramdisk.html
Describes an 80 MB Linux system that boots from a floppy, then accesses a Zip disk to load the rest of the filesystem into RAM. Might have some useful info. Bill At 03:05 PM 11/9/02 -0600, you wrote: >Anybody know of a *NIX distro that runs from a RAM drive? What would the >performance gain be? > >I just read about a RAM drive card on /. that can do 2GB, but the cost is >nutz. So I was thinking that since RAM is fairly cheap now and mobos are >supporting >larger amounts of RAM it would be cool to have a distro where the entire >filesystem in a big RAM drive. Permanent storage could be achieved by >writing the >contents of the RAM drive to the hard drive. It seems that something like >this would run faster than accessing a file system via the hard drive. The >only >drawback is keeping power up to the box, but with UPSs and the reliable >hardware available now, the risk would be worth the extra speed for certain >applications.
