Subject: ramFS Host
From: "Michael S. Zick" <mszick@morethan.org>
Date: Thu, 3 Jan 2008 08:30:42 -0600

Group,

A somewhat abstract question today ...

The usual protocol for a kernel booting with an initial ramFS (early userspace);
is for the setup and whatever initialization be done in the ramFS image;
then switch_root (which removes the initial ramFS contents) to the "run time"
storage media (yea, everyone here knows that) ...

But the size of a truly minimal VServer host image (logging, sshd, ntpd, network tables)
is not very big (target system is a mini-laptop (EeePC) with at least 0.5Gb ram) - -
Why "switch_root" for the host?
Why not just bring up the first (most likely only) user context as a vserver on the
run-time media - let the host context continue to run in ramFS?

Technically, it looks like it should work - -
Anybody tried this sort of setup?  Any practical problems encountered?
Of course, this setup would hold a few Mbytes of disk buffers out of the pool,
but the machine has a lot of ram, I don't think they would be missed.

Mike