[ale] Desktop 32GB of RAM

[Chris Fowler]

> From: "Steve Litt" <slitt at troubleshooters.com>
> To: ale at ale.org
> Sent: Tuesday, August 18, 2015 9:52:06 PM
> Subject: Re: [ale] Desktop 32GB of RAM

> On Tue, 18 Aug 2015 20:36:19 -0400 (EDT)
> Chris Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:

> > No VMs. Current desktop I built 01/2012. Needs faster disk I/O. I
> > spend about 45 minutes waiting on a compile of software when I do a
> > fresh checkout.

> > The reason I said 64GB is because when I was pricing out a
> > workstation on Penguin Computing's website the lowest was 64.
> > Personally, 16 is fine. With 64 though I could copy the source tree
> > into a ramdisk. Luckily I do have a UPS under my desk. :)

> The ramdisk idea seems good, although 64GB seems kind of big for a
> source tree (but a du -h would settle that matter).

32GB would be the max. The tree is actually a SVN checkout within a CentOS 5.X tree. Hard to explain. I run Ubuntu on my desktop. In my home 
directory I have ~/CentOS-5.3. I run a script as root that will mount /proc, /dev, /dev/pts, /sys, etc as bind within that directory. I then run 'chroot CentOS-5.3 program.pl' and the next thing I know I am now in that root and can do things as if I was on the real CentOS system. I've been using this method for MANY years. I even have a RH 8.0 tree we still maintain code on! My SOP for creating a new devroot like this is to use vmplayer to do an install of CentOS and then from my desktop I execute 'ssh root at vm "tar <options here> -cf -" | tar -xvf -'. Shutdown vmplayer and not boot it again. 

Since I'm building new many ideas come to mind. Use Xen? Have my desktop as one vm and then CentOS 7 as another? Can that CentOS's root be a ram disk? If so, how would I populate it? Maybe use rsync in its initrd image and then pivot_root? I can then have a nightly process that would rsync that root back to the real drive. Failure of that rsync can text my phone. UPS would be required. 

Many possibilities! 
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