booting to ram

[Billie Walsh]

Knapp wrote:
> I found this for making a ram disk.
> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html
>
> So then the next step is to see what needs to be on that ram disk. Any
> ideas anyone?
> Anything that is loaded with the load of FF  would be good, I would think.
> Bin and sbin?
> Lib? (way to big!!) maybe just some of it?
> lib32?
> lib64?
>
>   

All this talk of ramdisks reminded me of something I did back in the 
dark ages of computers. I had a Leading Edge 8088XT [ 12MHz in Turbo 
mode ]. The memory was maxed out but I found something called a Rampat 
board [ an AT add on board with four memory slots ]. I had 100 meg of 
ram on it [ still got it around here somewhere ]. The computer couldn't 
access it directly, even with Himem, so I used it as a ramdisk. My 
menu.bat would copy the entire program over to the ramdisk [ remember - 
this was back in the days when most programs fit on a 5.25 floppy - and 
they didn't spread bits and pieces all over the hard drive ] and execute 
it from there. Those OLD programs would fairly fly. Games were a _lot_ 
more fun. On exit the bat file would copy any changed files back to the 
hard drive and remove the program from the ramdisk ready for the next 
program. At a guess I think using ramdisk doubled, or even tripled, the 
speed of program execution for programs that required a lot of disk 
read/write.

It would be a great idea if someone could make a board like that old 
Rampat board for modern memory. OR, if you can afford one, use one of 
the new _very_ large SD cards.

-- 
Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans.