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Are there any good Raspberry Pi distributions that load completely into RAM?

I know a few Linux x86 distributions that do this pretty well, but I want to do the same with my Raspberry Pi.

I would like to be able to boot from the SD card and then be able to remove it without errors.

Peter Mortensen
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phillips1012
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  • You might want to look at this first: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=48662&p=380872 There might be a module you could rmmod to stop that but OTOH: the source seems to be a hardware interrupt, indicating the pi responds to badly to the missing SD card. – goldilocks Sep 14 '13 at 12:18
  • I don't know if you know about the Linux distro "Puppy Linux", but the desktop edition runs completely on RAM. They've made a Raspi version called Puppi, but I'm not sure if that version runs completely on RAM – slippery Sep 14 '13 at 20:37

3 Answers3

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Yes there is; my project Nard SDK
http://www.arbetsmyra.dyndns.org/nard/
does exactly what you want. It's a slimmed OS which runs entirely from RAM and has full support for removing the SD card in runtime.

Ronny Nilsson
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Alpine Linux loads into RAM. In its default configuration, it mounts a squashfs from the SD card for kernel modules and firmware, but you should be able to disable that; you may need to arrange for more modules to be in the initfs (via flags to the update-kernel program) depending on what other hardware and capabilities you are using.

I am currently running it in "data" mode (where /var is mounted from the SD card, but the base system is in RAM) on a Pi Zero W, and it is working well.

Michael Ekstrand
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You might also want to check out this operating system called slack linux. I did not try this with the pi but with a computer with 1 GB of ram. Therefore I beleive it would work on the Pi 2 because of the amount of ram. Here is a site for putting it on the Pi2.

NULL
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