FreeBSD working from RAM (MFSROOT) as a Workstation.

[Warren Block]

On Thu, 4 Dec 2014, Paul Pathiakis via freebsd-questions wrote:
> On 12/04/2014 19:46, Polytropon wrote:
>> On Fri, 05 Dec 2014 01:07:38 +0200, clutton wrote:
>>> Is anyone use a FreeBSD as a Desktop working from RAM, using MFSROOT?
>> Many live systems work that way. For FreeBSD, check out
>> FreeSBIE (sadly discontinued, but probably still available
>> for download; NB: FreeBSD 5 and 6). Programs are loaded
>> from CD (slow), but once they are "buffered" in RAM, things
>> work fine. It would be interesting to see of this
>> bottleneck could be removed by pre-loading as much into
>> RAM as possible, and of course avoiding optical media
>> as load media (instead, using a SSD or at least USB to
>> boot).
>> 
>>> As a memory is relatively cheep it can be even faster then ssd.
>> Then check this out:
>> 
>> http://www.sandisk.com.br/enterprise/ulltradimm-ssd/
>> 
>> Best of both worlds, and it could make the past come
>> back (cf. AS/400 single-level storage). :-)

> I would be interested in this as well.  If no one has done it lately, I'd 
> like to work with some people and get this going as well.

Seems like it would not be too difficult to do with a separate root 
filesystem.  Boot that from disk or network and it creates a tmpfs and 
loads it with a /usr image.  Or mdmfs could be used, but tmpfs has less 
overhead.