v. 4.4 "beta" run from RAM bug

[sup3rw0rm]

Version 4.4 (which hasn't been released yet) crashes when trying to run from RAM. It coughs up a message about running out of space. I can confirm this on machines with 512 MB of RAM. Version 4.3 boots fine. I hope PartedMagic hasn't become too fat lol!

Anyway, I wanted to catch this before the new version is released. I understand a prompt can be given to inform the user that they need more memory to run from RAM, but it would be great to still be able to do this with 512MB.

[Patrick Verner]

Yes, Parted Magic is getting fat. /usr/lib is up to 112MB right now. About 2/3 of /usr/lib is xorg and firefox. What I was thinking about doing is putting these folders in a squashfs and mounting them instead. This should help some of the RAM usage issues.

I test this every release with Virtual Box, so I'm aware of RAM bloat and I'm currently not real happy with the current system requirements.

[Patrick Verner]

I tested my theories. By just compressing /usr/lib/firefox and /usr/lib/xorg with squashfs and mounting them at boot, it will boot with 420MB of RAM. I think I might look into this further... I bet 256MB from RAM is "possible" with enough tinkering.

[Patrick Verner]

I have it down to 384MB to run from RAM. I think that is pretty good. That's better than it has been for quite some time. Almost the entire /usr/lib directory is compressed now.

[sup3rw0rm]

Great job!

[Patrick Verner]

I have /usr, /lib/modules, and /lib/firmware as a squashfs and mounted using unionfs in their correct places. Parted Magic now runs just fine from RAM with 256MB. When squashfs has lzma compression this will improve a bit more. If I didn't say anything, you can't even tell I did this because it functions the same as before (completely R/W). The only space that's using uncompressed files is /bin, /sbin, and some of /lib which accounts for about 13MB. Booting is also much faster because it doesn't need to copy a bunch of uncompressed files to a tmpfs.

5.0 is going to be a redesign splitting things up with unionfs, so this is about as far as I can take it for now without rewriting the entire init.

[sup3rw0rm]

You, sir, are molding the best live/rescue CD by far. I'm not a programmer but I'll test anything I can to help perfect this project.

[sup3rw0rm]

Are we too big for 256MB again? No biggie, just wondering if its something wrong with my virtual machine.

[Patrick Verner]

No, I have 13MB of free space.

[sup3rw0rm]

Ok. My virtual machine crashes when trying to run from RAM with 256MB. Runs fine with 512. I just figured the sound drivers may have pushed the requirement back over 256.

[EDIT]
Scratch that. Works fine this morning. Odd.