Using latest stable TinyCore from the downloads section, I managed to get it to PXEBoot and use my NFS server for persistence and package storage.
However, I am noticing something strange about the memory usage in this setup: Loading up packages has the same effect as downloading them to the /tmp/tce directory (apparently still located in RAM per the cloud-mode)!
I know that the NFS mount works fine, because all of my packages/profile load correctly on a my dev system (which has enough memory to hold it all), and everything (with exception to the memory issue) works as expected.
I was under the impression that by enabling a persistent storage method would alleviate this "temporary caching" thing, but it does not seem to be the case. As a proof of concept, I omitted the tce=nfs/tce boot option (thereby stopping the persistent storage feature) but keeping the NFS mount. My mem free at the end stabilizes at 99636 (I'm assuming kb, top doesn't specify). After using the normal boot options, I am left with only 6344 kb free ram. I know about 15Mb has been take by the firefox profile, as reported by du, but I still have 84 mb to account for, which would approximate (almost) the total size of the packages loaded.
Ideally, what I would like is the packages to be directly mounted from the NFS share so they don't have to be resident in memory, thereby freeing the memory it would take to cache them and actually allowing X to run properly (apparently it just can't take it
). I'm not too worried about loosing connection to the NFS Server (if that happens, the network is down and the terminal I'm running Tiny Core would be useless anyways), so that's a non-issue.
Any hints on where I've gone wrong or assumed incorrectly?
(On a side note, Tiny Core is extremely awesome, claiming the first place on my list of distros that my thin clients boot properly and without much hubaloo. The other is the DSL distro with rootfs embedded in initrd)