What is the maximum size of such file systems?
Would it be increased if I burned the file system to a blueray drive?
As far as I know, iso files (ISO 9660) has the upper limit to 32G.
Since the entire repo of 7.x, x64 platform doesn't exceed 8G, that won't be a problem for you.
Is this limited by RAM or the Swap size? I would assume so.
FYI, my computer:
CPU: i5-4440
RAM: 16G
Running virtualbox with
3 processing units, and
9G of RAM.
No swap partition, boot code
without nozswap.
Loading every single extensions takes about 10 minutes.
Checking memory with "cat /proc/meminfo"
MemTotal: 9206224 kB
MemFree: 248016 kB
MemAvailable: 1772452 kB
Buffers: 6892 kB
Cached: 8562216 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 427472 kB
Inactive: 8215260 kB
Active(anon): 305064 kB
Inactive(anon): 6887920 kB
Active(file): 122408 kB
Inactive(file): 1327340 kB
Unevictable: 0 kB
Mlocked: 0 kB
SwapTotal: 2281788 kB
SwapFree: 2281788 kB
Dirty: 0 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
AnonPages: 73612 kB
Mapped: 46128 kB
Shmem: 7119364 kB
Slab: 283568 kB
SReclaimable: 119664 kB
SUnreclaim: 163904 kB
KernelStack: 2496 kB
PageTables: 2804 kB
NFS_Unstable: 0 kB
Bounce: 0 kB
WritebackTmp: 0 kB
CommitLimit: 6884900 kB
Committed_AS: 7423652 kB
VmallocTotal: 34359738367 kB
VmallocUsed: 15888 kB
VmallocChunk: 34359718180 kB
AnonHugePages: 14336 kB
DirectMap4k: 153536 kB
DirectMap2M: 9283584 kB
In short, if you're not limited by the hardware, anything is possible.
P.S. with copy2fs.flg and copy2fs.lst