[OmniOS-discuss] OmniOS considered in-memory OS ?

[Richard Elling]

> On Jun 26, 2015, at 8:47 AM, John Barfield <john.barfield at bissinc.com> wrote:
> 
> I’ve been interested in configuring omnios to run in memory off of a ram 
> disk myself. 
> 
> Does anyone know where you could find a good guide for booting Solaris(h) 
> kernel into memory with a ramdisk?

:-)
the funny thing is that SunOS has been bootable into ramdisk since... forever.
Back in the day, before CDs were invented, we booted from tape or (if you really
hated yourself) floppies :-). Net-net, this probably isn't documented anywhere, per se,
outside of the building shell scripts :-(

The way it works is to produce an image of a file system. Add that to a boot loader
and instruct the boot loader to put it in memory and run. The actual work is to produce
the image, and this is where the build scripts comes into play. You can certainly take
an OmniOS build and produce an in-memory root, however, the missing management
part is handling the persistence of identity. For that, it is useful to see how SmartOS
handles /var and files normally modified in /etc.
 -- richard