On Thu January 3 2008 10:03, Natanael Copa wrote: > Thanks! That sounds very much like what I had in mind. ramFS/tmpFS - not that much difference when the machine does not have disk swap. (Since the internal drive is non-replaceable SSD - the machine runs in a "swap off" state.) But if the user wanted to keep a SDHC card plugged in - then they could have swap. Just change the card when (if) it wears out and no touchy when the machine is up. Mike > > On Thu, 2008-01-03 at 08:30 -0600, Michael S. Zick wrote: > > 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. > > I do something very similar in my alpine linux distro. Instead of just > continuing in initramfs, the init script mounts a tmpfs, finds a base > installation (2-3MB) and "switch_root" to the tmpfs. From here it loads > a set of packages (from usb/cdrom/cf) and configuration (from > usb/floppy/cf). > > >From this base installation it is possible to mount disks, raid, iscsi, > lvm and fire up vserver guests. > > In short you boot from usb/cdrom/cf, run your vserver host from tmpfs > and run your guests from disks. > > tools are available to save your configuration to floppy/usb. > > http://wiki.alpinelinux.org > > (make sure to boot one of the vsgrsec-* kernels) > > -nc > > > > > Mike > > >