[arch-general] [arch-dev-public] ArchISO FTP Installer - Testers Needed

[Aaron Griffin]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:12 PM, Simo Leone <simo at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 03:38:01PM +0200, Grigorios Bouzakis wrote:
>  >
>  > WOW thanks!
>  > I had always been wondering how an Archlinux live CD would look and
>  > function, and now its the time to find out.
>  > May ask what are the requirements for it? Especially RAM usage.
>  > I intend to try it at some point later today or tomorrow afternoon
>  > and will post feedback.
>  >
>  My testing methods here are far from perfect, but the ftp install image
>  boots to a shell with as little as 22mb of ram. This was tested in qemu
>  by decreasing the emulated RAM 1mb at a time and seeing if it ran out of
>  memory during the bootup sequence.
>
>  Of course, as soon as you start running things they need memory as well,
>  but this gives you a good idea of the "bare minimum" value.
>
>  Hope that answers your question :)

To put this a little more plainly: It is a complete install of
Archlinux, just on a cd instead of a hard drive. The RAM usage will be
as minimal as a bare-bones Arch install.

Now, many people may be thinking "but what if I want to remove my cd
from the drive?" - funny enough, that should work ok unless you need
to access the "disk".

You *can* add the "copytoram" boot param (yay grub) to have the
squashfs image copied to ram first. I'm not sure of the actual image
size anymore, but that should soak about 100-150 megs of RAM extra.

One of the next steps would be to actually add another parameter to
unpack the squashfs image into ram. This would take... oh, I dunno
300-400 megs of RAM?