Mirimir wrote: > > On 04/03/2019 05:40 PM, Jim wrote: >> Mirimir wrote: >>> On 04/03/2019 08:03 AM, Ben Tasker wrote: >>>> When the system boots from the disk, it loads the OS into memory, so >>>> things >>>> like your browser cache files are written into memory (and so lost >>>> when the >>>> DIMMs lose charge). If you want persistence then most live CDs will >>>> allow >>>> you to provide a writeable media (normally a USB drive) for that >>>> purpose, >>>> but then you get back into the risks associated with having writeable >>>> media >>>> available. >> As I stated in an earlier email I am out of date on this but in the "old >> days" this was certainly not true. In the original Knoppix (which is >> the grandfather of all live systems TMK) if you had the memory there was >> a mode where you could load the image into memory, but this was not >> necessary. If you did load the image into memory things ran a lot >> faster. But the only files that *had to* reside in memory were those >> that were writable. Over the years there have been at least two >> different methods allowing writable files that reside in memory to >> dynamically and transparently be used in place of the read-only files on >> the original image. >> >> I have certainly run live CDs on computers that had much less RAM than >> the size of the CD. > > I don't recall ever trying that with "normal" LiveCDs. And even "normal" > LiveDVDs are rarely much over 1GB. But I was talking about a custom > LiveDVD that I built. Which had a Debian system plus VirtualBox and > another ~3GB of virtual machine data. I do recall trying to boot that in > a machine with 4GB RAM, with no joy. Maybe I wasn't patient enough. And > it did take some minutes to come up in the 8GB machine.
If your ~3GB of virtual machine data had to be read during the boot process I would think that would change the situation dramaticly. > Wild guess: maybe you need to design LiveCDs so they'll boot quickly in > low-RAM systems. > >>> True. And there are some limitations. As far as I know, all live >>> read-only systems allocate half of the physical RAM to the system, and >>> half to working memory. So if your machine has 4GB RM, you can load at >>> most a 2GB system image. >>> >>> But DVDs can hold ~4.7GB. So if your machine has 8GB RAM, you can load >>> 4GB from the DVD. Years ago, I built a live ISO with Debian, VirtualBox, >>> a pfSense VPN gateway VM, and stripped-down Whonix gateway and >>> workstation VMs. The workstation VM had just a simple openbox GUI. It >>> took several minutes to boot, but was very responsive afterward. >> -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
