Re: [tor-talk] Is there a way to use internet in a sandbox environment? (Linux)

[Jim <jimmymac@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Mirimir wrote:
> 
> On 04/03/2019 05:40 PM, Jim wrote:
>> Mirimir wrote:
>>> On 04/03/2019 08:03 AM, Ben Tasker wrote:
>>>> When the system boots from the disk, it loads the OS into memory, so
>>>> things
>>>> like your browser cache files are written into memory (and so lost
>>>> when the
>>>> DIMMs lose charge).  If you want persistence then most live CDs will
>>>> allow
>>>> you to provide a writeable media (normally a USB drive) for that
>>>> purpose,
>>>> but then you get back into the risks associated with having writeable
>>>> media
>>>> available.
>> As I stated in an earlier email I am out of date on this but in the "old
>> days" this was certainly not true.  In the original Knoppix (which is
>> the grandfather of all live systems TMK) if you had the memory there was
>> a mode where you could load the image into memory, but this was not
>> necessary.  If you did load the image into memory things ran a lot
>> faster.  But the only files that *had to* reside in memory were those
>> that were writable.  Over the years there have been at least two
>> different methods allowing writable files that reside in memory to
>> dynamically and transparently be used in place of the read-only files on
>> the original image.
>>
>> I have certainly run live CDs on computers that had much less RAM than
>> the size of the CD.
> 
> I don't recall ever trying that with "normal" LiveCDs. And even "normal"
> LiveDVDs are rarely much over 1GB. But I was talking about a custom
> LiveDVD that I built. Which had a Debian system plus VirtualBox and
> another ~3GB of virtual machine data. I do recall trying to boot that in
> a machine with 4GB RAM, with no joy. Maybe I wasn't patient enough. And
> it did take some minutes to come up in the 8GB machine.

If your ~3GB of virtual machine data had to be read during the boot
process I would think that would change the situation dramaticly.

> Wild guess: maybe you need to design LiveCDs so they'll boot quickly in
> low-RAM systems.
> 
>>> True. And there are some limitations. As far as I know, all live
>>> read-only systems allocate half of the physical RAM to the system, and
>>> half to working memory. So if your machine has 4GB RM, you can load at
>>> most a 2GB system image.
>>>
>>> But DVDs can hold ~4.7GB. So if your machine has 8GB RAM, you can load
>>> 4GB from the DVD. Years ago, I built a live ISO with Debian, VirtualBox,
>>> a pfSense VPN gateway VM, and stripped-down Whonix gateway and
>>> workstation VMs. The workstation VM had just a simple openbox GUI. It
>>> took several minutes to boot, but was very responsive afterward.
>>


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