[lug] umount /dev/hda

[Michael D. Hirsch]

On Thursday 29 May 2003 10:21 am, Garett Shulman wrote:
> Michael, thanks a lot for your suggestion. Do you have any ideas how I
> can find out which files/directories need to be on the ramdisk? -Garett

I guess the best way is to use find.  As find to find all files that have 
changed since you last rebooted.  That will give you a good start.

Mostly, the /var/ directory and all it contains is all that changes.  Be 
sure to rotate your logs quickly in /var/log cause you don't want to fill 
up ram with your logs.  Configure mail to not be received on the system.  
Most linux installs send mail that you might not expect.

A few programs will write to files in /etc.  ntp and mrtg are two that I 
know of.

If you run a shell in interactive mode it will try to write a history file.  
I don't know how it behaves if it can't write it.  You can probably turn 
that off, anyway.

I suggest that you make the obvious changes, then watch your logs carefully 
for any error messages.  Fix them and try again.  That was my solution, as 
I recall.

Michael

> Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> >On Thursday 29 May 2003 06:53 am, Garett Shulman wrote:
> >>Hello Everybody, I have a progear tablet pc running linux. I use it
> >> more or less as a very cool X display. I don't really run any apps on
> >> the progear itself. The ram is never more than half full and the swap
> >> is never more than 0. However, the HD spins up and down every minute.
> >> I have tried noflushd. no luck.
> >
> >Have you tried adding "noatime" to the mount options?  This could help
> >quite a bit.
> >
> >>I would like to just unmount the hard
> >>drive and let linux exist completely in memory. Does anybody have any
> >>suggestions or know of any documents I might check out? Thanks a lot.
> >
> >I haven't quite done this, but something almost as good.  I once fixed
> > up a laptop so that all dirves were mounted read-only.  This was
> > before Linux had any journalling filesystems and I wanted to be able
> > to turn the power off without long fsck times on restart.
> >
> >You need to make yourself a ramdisk and copy a few files/directories to
> > it. Any file that changes needs to be on the ramdisk.  Symlinks are
> > your friend.
> >
> >Once you get it working, nothing will ever change on the disk, so the
> > drive will only spin up when you need something from it.
> >
> >Michael
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