HOWTO: Mount / in RAM and load apps instantly

[Redmumba]

I've read through all the posts, and tried some tweaking of my own, but it doesn't seem like I'm able to mount my initrd image. I'm receiving the same "linuxrc failed" reported earlier, but I'm actually not able to access ANY of the executables. But its saying that the ramdisk *is* being mounted on 1:0... booting back into my normal install, I mount the initrd image and all the files are there and have correct permissions.

Is there any reason why my initrd image wouldn't be loading, but say it is? Ramdisk and Initial Ramdisk support are _all_ built into the kernel, so I'm not sure what would be causing this...

Andrew


grub.conf

[slick]

Why dont try the simplest way:

- create a ramdisk (greater than du -sh /usr/lib), i.E.: mount none -t tmpfs /mnt/ramdisk
- copy all files from /usr/lib to the ramdisk, i.E.: cp -a /usr/lib/* /mnt/ramdisk
- mount the ramdisk to /usr/lib, i.E: mount -o bind /mnt/ramdisk/ /usr/lib/
- if you like to update your system, just umount /usr/lib and /mnt/ramdisk, update the system and do the stuff above again

(this can simple do in the background in /etc/conf.d/local.start)

Now OpenOffice and other big apps starts in <1 sec. and no extra modification on systemfiles are necessary, you probably need a little bit more ram (in my case ~ 1.2 GB only for the ramdisk )



(sorry for my bad english)

[aych]

what would the effect of this be, I presume the bootup times will suffer significantly..

I was thinking what would happen if it was a rc script on startup which allows for normal bootup from hard drive and standard usage. After normal loading then it will being populating a tmpfs with predefined folders etc, then after the tmpfs is setup mount the tmpfs over the existing /lib. would it cause system instability swapping over half way during normal usage?

[PhoeniXII]

thanks for the great tip,

even though it ads approx 40 sec to my boot-up time,
since I put the whole /usr dir in mem,

but I never had such a responsive system before ^_^

[ChrisCummins]

I understand that this is an old thread, but it still seems relevant, so I'll just ask: