[Fedora-livecd-list] feature idea: boot option to copy entire livecd into RAM

[Gregory Fowler]

On 06/07/2011 04:17 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
> I'm using a Fedora 14 live CD at the moment to make an image copy of 
> one hard disk to another.  It's working fine, but every minute or two 
> the optical drive spins up for no apparent reason.  I'm not sure 
> what's doing that, but it occurs to me that it might be possible to 
> kill two birds with one stone here, the other bird being that 
> interactive use of the live CD is painfully slow due to the relatively 
> poor performance of the optical drive.
>
> How difficult would it be to have livecd-creator build the image such 
> that there is a boot option to copy the entire livecd into a ramdisk, 
> and unmount the optical drive?  Since most new laptops have at least 
> 3GB of RAM, this seems like it might be useful to a lot of users.  It 
> also would allow the optical drive to be used for other purposes while 
> running the live image.
>
> I suppose someone might ask why I am not using a live image on a USB 
> flash drive rather than the optical drive. That's because the Sony 
> VAIO I'm using seems to have BIOS issues that prevent successfully 
> booting from a USB flash drive.  :-(
>
> Eric
>
>
> --
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If you are talking about the live_ram argument passed to init, then we 
do not need the livecd-tools to do this. It may not be worth the 
maintainers patching the scripts to do this, because it is so easy to 
accomplish in your ks.cfg.
Try a finish script  or try the bootloader --append  or just pas the arg 
to the bootloader interactively.  See below.


Finish script:
You can use a nochroot script   to create an entry in isolinux.cfg 
and/or EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.conf with the live_ram arg or with any other 
extra args you may need.
1. copy one bootloader entry to $LIVE_ROOT/isolinux/liveram.cfg,
2. edit that append line and add live_ram,
perl -pe "s/(  append.*)/\1 live_ram/" -i \$LIVE_ROOT/isolinux/liveram.cfg
(Or some folks like sed as the stream editor in scripts, use that.)
3. catenate the liveram.cfg to the end of isolinux.cfg

**Use a similar command for your EFI boot loader config file

BOOTLOADER --append "
You may even be able to pass the live_ram arg using the bootloader 
option in the ks.cfg file (i have not tried this but i think it should work)
bootloader --append="console=tty console=ttyS0,115200n8 apic=debug 
ignore_loglevel splash=verbose live_ram"

Or you can interrupt the boot loader grub.efi or isolinux  and pass the 
live_ram arg  interactively.



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