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 As I stated in an earlier email I am out of date on this but in the "old 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. 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