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

[Dark Penguin]

Oooh, I never thought about this use case!.. I thought it's just for
convenience: you can get an ultra-fast system instead of really slow
USB, and you don't have to worry about accidentally mixing up the drives
and nuking your flash.

My current use case is: make a multi-boot USB as a sysadmin tool for
rescue, bug testing and distro testing. Removing the flash after boot is
convenient if I work on several computers at the same time, and things
being really fast helps too. Reducing the memory requirements would
help, and removing the need to repack filesystem.squashfs into an ISO
would help greatly.

I would suggest having "toram" keep the existing functionality, but
adding "toram=filesystem.squashfs" that acts the same way as in Debian
(loads only the specified file). However, this would probably be a
significant pain to implement, for a moderate benefit in a pretty exotic
use case. Unless more people want it for whatever they are doing.

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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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