Hi all, have been running a custom version of LinuxMint 16 mate in ram for the last couple of weeks now, and I must say that I'm very impressed with the speed and overall performance. I found a script called RAM_Booster, which takes your currently installed distro, compresses it into an squashfs filesystem, and then mounts it to ram, then boots from it.

When I run this command, it shows some impressive write speeds.

1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.0389547 s, 2.7 GB/s

real 0m0.243s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.044s


Here are the specs of my pc

Core i7 4770 Haswell (gen 4)
16 gb of ram (2x8gb) G Skill 1333 mhz
2 gb ddr5 gtx560 Nvidia
120 gb agility 3 ssd read/write 430/400 mb/s

Love to hear some coments, especially if you have been doing the same.

Hi there,

actually, this is what most Live systems have done for the last years. I've never thought about using that principle for a regular system; after all, there are some severe drawback, aren't there? Such as not being able to store configuration changes persistently or run system updates, because then you'd have to write that stuff into the squashfs at runtime.

If you really want to go for an "untouchable", unbreakable system, that may be an interesting concept, though.

I don't think this is really relevant. Sure, read and write operations with a RAM-resident system are blazingly fast (and I assume that /var and /temp are mounted to a tmpfs in RAM, too). But to actually use the system, you'd require a persistent partition, like /home being mounted to /dev/sda2 or the like. And that's where most write access will take place, apart from temp files or updating logs. Write access to the root filesystem should be negligible in normal operation.

Well, you asked for it. ;-)

[X] Doc CPU

Hi Doc CPU,

Yeah I know live systems have been doing this for some time now, made a few live distros myself. There are definetly some draw backs to this type of system like the log files being lost everytime you reboot or loose power, a UPS is on the card soon as I can afford one, but for my main desktop PC, that's fine, I certainly wouldn't recommend it for a server.

I am running /home on a seperate partition to hold or my configration files, should have mentioned that as well, programs like firefox still use the cache in the /home directory are still the same unless you move them to ram. I'm using a custom live version that I made so it already has all the software on it i'm going to use, so I don't need to update it all as far as software goes.

The developer of the script wrote an update script that remakes the squashfs filesystem for you, so any updates or new programs that I wont to keep, will then become part of the system permanetly, I also have another spare drive that I use for storage.


It is fun to play around with, and I always have a nice clean system everytime I boot.

Thanks for the feedback