[TriLUG] SOLVED Re: booting off usbstick

[Joseph Mack NA3T via TriLUG]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2020, Bill Farrow via TriLUG wrote:

update:

Originally I booted off a lexar (usb2) stick in a usb2 port that the bios knows 
about. This was as slow as a wet week and the latency when editing with vi was 
enormous (doing line yank and move). This was mainly due to the lexar being a 
very slow usb drive.

The machine has a usb3 card, so once the kernel is booted from the usb2 stick, I 
can load the rootfs from a usb3 stick on the usb3 card. Once that's up and 
running, I can pull the usb2 stick from the front panel. This arrangement is as 
fast as running off a hard disk and stayed up till I shut it down (about a 
week).

I found that I got near enough to the same speed by putting a usb3 stick into 
the usb2 port on the front panel. It seems that the slow part is reading and 
writing to the usb stick and not the usb2 interface.

Joe

> You should be able to make initrd copy the root filesystem into a RAM
> fs and mount that as the rootfs instead of the USB drive. Then
> periodically or manually sync the RAM fs with the USB drive so changes
> get preserved..

-- 
Joseph Mack NA3T EME(B,D), FM05lw North Carolina
jmack (at) wm7d (dot) net - azimuthal equidistant
map generator at http://www.wm7d.net/azproj.shtml
Homepage http://www.austintek.com/ It's GNU/Linux!