[Bug 1915515] Re: "toram" loads the entire media, not just filesystem.squashfs

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

toram is meant to be the option for single disk devices.

I.e. when iso is blasted on the drive. machine is booted off that drive.
installer is transfered to ram. and then installation is done on the
same drive.

Unless we transfer all of ISO to ram, this will not be possible to
complete correctly, or at all if there is no network connectivity.

** Changed in: casper (Ubuntu)
       Status: New => Opinion

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1915515

Title:
  "toram" loads the entire media, not just filesystem.squashfs

Status in casper package in Ubuntu:
  Opinion

Bug description:
  Is this really necessary? I see many downsides, but fail to see any
  upside.

  - It adds 700 MB to the amount of memory required, and it's just some
  packages, most of which that can be downloaded. If some of them can
  not be downloaded (such as wireless firmware blobs), they can be
  installed before taking the drive out. If the user wants to install
  packages from an installation media, then it's OK to ask them to put
  the media in.

  - This makes multi-boot USB flash drives more of a pain. With Debian,
  instead of putting the whole ISO there, we can keep only
  filesystem.squashfs (and the kernel and initrd). And then we can
  easily edit that filesystem.squashfs if necessary. But in the same
  scenario, Ubuntu tries to load the whole flashdrive into RAM (and
  that's usually 32G or 64G...), so we have to use iso-scan instead.
  Then if we want to edit filesystem.squashfs, then we have to repack it
  into an ISO for the sole reason of limiting what gets copied into RAM.

  I've seen this question asked a few times:
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1148912/toram-loads-entire-pendrive-to-ram
  https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=317064

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