Operating Systems in Memory (I Wonder...)

[David Lloyd]

I'm about to buy myself my Christmas present (a Intel E6300 Core 2 Duo) 
and it seems that I could stack 4Gb of memory into it. It strikes me 
that for the genrally read only parts of an operating system, you could 
stack most of that into a write through memory file system and still 
have memory left over...

It would go something like this:

1. Boot machine
2. Copy /usr, /opt into "memory file system"
3. Intercept file system calls to look at memory file system
    - if read, read from memory
    - if a write, write to memory then write to disk

Does this sound crazy or am I onto something?

DSL