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Description
With today's computers usually shipping with a minimum of 1G RAM, a standard install CD could easily transfer all data into memory.
Benefits for User Experience:
* Alleviate/remove jerky movements CD reader makes while both booting and installing.
* Vastly improve user experience while interacting with the LiveCD as the CD will not be accessed.
* Vastly improve install speed as CD will not be accessed.
* Vastly improve shutdown speed of LiveCD mode, since nothing needs to be done, it's all volatile anyway, just simply halt or reboot.
* Once CD is copied, it can be removed way before shutdown, even on boot, so there won't be a need to have that annoying pause and request for user to hit enter at shutdown.
* Makes LiveCD greener as CD drive will not be spun up or down after initial copy.
Benefits for Developer Experience:
* Test device can be PXE booted via network
* Possible because initrd will just copy from a different place, the network, rather than CD. In-memory after loading will therefore be the same.
* Faster to read from LAN than from latent CD reader
* No need to *write* ISO file to CD. Just create it.
Suggestion for implementation:
* Once initrd loads, make decision based on what /proc/meminfo reports for total RAM, with option to override with kernel boot option.
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Comments
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hunteke wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 05:47
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Also greener because the CD drive on the development system(s) will be used way less because it won't need to write the ISO file to CD but once in a blue moon.
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hunteke wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 05:50
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I also probably should have mentioned that this has been done, and it's not altogether that complicated. The last time I messed with something like this was a couple of years ago. I think the BCCD (http://bccd.net/) has a boot option to runinram. And, as I recall the BCCD is based on another project that has similar options, LNX-BBC (http://www.lnx-bbc.com/).
So there are at least two examples of already "in the wild" Linux distributions that can run entirely from RAM.
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Peetke wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 11:01
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Would be great! Not only as a LiveCD/Intall CD, but with all cd's that are inserted. My system has 4GB of ram. Don't mind giving up 700MB for a lightning-speed cd-rom. With DVD/BluRay you can buffer the first part/smart buffer a big part.
Benefits for User Experience:
* Cd-rom makes a lot less noise (only one straight stripe read)
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Sukarn wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 11:41
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Stuff like this (as mentioned by hunteke) has already been done in some small distributions. One such distribution that I use often is SLAX.
However, I have only got 512 MB RAM, and so systems like mine cannot have the whole Ubuntu CD copied to the RAM, not to forget that the stuff in the live CD is compressed and is decompressed on the fly when it is needed, so that needs extra RAM.
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steve196 wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 12:20
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I accidentially voted this down. Sorry.
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jmmL wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 15:45
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I think at least some of the features you'd like to see are available with the boot argument "toram". As far as i understand, this offloads the entire contents of the CD into your computers RAM, to gain the benefits you've pointed out.
@Peetke: There are definitely advantages to be had from what you mention, but there may be legal issues; in some countries it won't be legal to copy certain discs, and i can imagine that loading a CD/DVD into RAM might well constitute "copying" a disc.
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hunteke wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 16:57
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@jmmL
I think at least some of the features you'd like to see are available with the boot argument "toram". As far as i understand, this offloads the entire contents of the CD into your computers RAM, to gain the benefits you've pointed out.
Ah! That's cool! I didn't know about that, and probably should have looked more thoroughly at my boot options. On the other hand, the point is user experience, especially as I try to impress folks during OS Saturday mornings at the mall. Having it be by default if there's enough RAM I think would be big boon for the initial *wow* factor.
... but there may be legal issues; in some countries it won't be legal to copy certain discs, and i can imagine that loading a CD/DVD into RAM might well constitute "copying" a disc.
Eh, I think this is more FUD than anything else. At some point or other *everything* goes into RAM, or else the computer (and hence the user) never sees it. There's no difference between doing it all at once, or in little pieces. Remember, RAM is volatile; when power dies, so does the contents of RAM. Copying it to the HDD, or some non-volatile piece of hardware /might/ constitute copying, but even that is suspect, e.g. if it's done temporarily, as, say, to swap space.
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rs3york wrote on the 27 Mar 08 at 17:29
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I think this a good idea, to load to RAM if there is enough present. So I voted up for this.
Of course there is one problem though...if the LiveCD is completely in RAM then the LiveCD will run faster than a proper install. I'm not sure if it's a good thing that the 'trial version' is faster than a proper install.
Sure the installed version will boot faster, but the RAM version should run faster. I guess once an install is done, people will be less likely to remove the OS.
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zmjjmz wrote on the 28 Mar 08 at 03:43
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DSL already does this, and the toram option requires 128MB RAM whereas DSL is 50MB large. I'm not sure of the exact figures, but you'd need more than 1GB of RAM to do this. On the other hand, in the future, when many systems come with 2GB or more RAM, this will be very feasible.
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