Hello Alex, On 17/02/2024 04:33, Alex King wrote:
I'm wanting to use a debian-live image to wipe the disks on some systems being decommissioned. To do that, I believe I need to copy filesystem.squashfs into ram so it isn't sitting on a disk to be wiped.
Why do you need to have filesystem.squashfs in RAM? If you boot from a USB or DVD/CD-ROM medium, the filesystem.squashfs resides there, and there is no need to have a copy in RAM.
After the live system has been booted, you can wipe all disks as you want. <snip>
I tried live-boot(7)"toram" paramater. This actually worked on my test machine, but to my surprise it copied the whole 4G root filesystem to ram instead of just filesystem.squashfs. While it worked on this system (albeit wasting a lot of time and RAM from the 16G on this machine), it would not work in other cases where the root filesystem may be 500G and RAM only 4G.
On the live images nearly all of the size is used by filesystem.squashfs, so you wouldn't win a lot if you copy only that file to RAM. If you need something with a smaller footprint, you can use the 'standard' image, which does not contain a graphical environment.
If you want to have your own set of packages in the live image, I would recommend to build you own. See [1] and [2].
With kind regards, Roland Clobus[1] https://live-team.pages.debian.net/live-manual/html/live-manual/index.en.html
[2] https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleInstalls/LiveImages
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