Can't get 7.6.1 Live USB to use less than half of RAM

Hello, everyone. I am new to Knoppix and the forum but not UNIX/Linux. I am trying to respect everyone's time and have read the FAQ and searched the forums and the Internet using a wide variety of keywords to try to find the answer myself with no luck. I am posting as a last resort. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Dell R900 with 128GB of RAM but no disks (I can't afford to buy any at this time). I created a Knoppix 7.6.1 Live USB drive using these instructions but when I booted up the system was consuming 64GB RAM in rootfs, which is not only overkill but makes it impossible to do the graph visualization that prompted this setup in the first place because I need every last MB of RAM for the Java VM. I searched around and discovered the ramdisk_size parameter and modified syslinux.cfg, syslnx32.cfg, and syslnx64.cfg to add "ramdisk_size=2097152" (which I understand to mean 2GB) to the APPEND statements using these instructions. Knoppix is still consuming 64GB in the rootfs no matter what permutations I try, and I'm up into the dozens of attempts at this point. There was a recent post that might be related to my problem but there is no definitive answer in that thread. I do not see any other cheat codes that might be applicable. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance.

When I boot Knoppix 7.6.1 of an ISO file on a harddisk with knoppix64, I get this:

Code:

# cat /proc/cmdline lang=de video=vga16fb:off apm=power-off nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/isolinux/linux64 bootfrom=//KNOPPIX_V7.6.1DVD-2016-01-16-EN.iso lang=en tz=Europe/Copenhagen keyboard=dk xkeyboard=dk no3d # free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15975 112 15357 31 505 15744 Swap: 4095 0 4095 # df -m Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 7986 1 7986 1% / /dev/sdb3 15999 10182 4982 68% /mnt-iso /dev/loop1 4249 4249 0 100% /mnt-system tmpfs 12780 3 12778 1% /ramdisk /dev/cloop 9691 9691 0 100% /KNOPPIX /dev/cloop1 451 451 0 100% /KNOPPIX1 unionfs 12780 3 12778 1% /usr tmpfs 20 4 17 16% /run tmpfs 10 1 10 1% /UNIONFS/var/lock tmpfs 100 1 100 1% /UNIONFS/var/log tmpfs 2048 1 2048 1% /tmp udev 20 0 20 0% /dev tmpfs 2048 0 2048 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 1598 1 1598 1% /run/user/1000 tmpfs 1598 0 1598 0% /run/user/0

If I add the boot parameter ramdisk=1G I get thhis:

Code:

# cat /proc/cmdline lang=de video=vga16fb:off apm=power-off nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/isolinux/linux64 bootfrom=//KNOPPIX_V7.6.1DVD-2016-01-16-EN.iso lang=en tz=Europe/Copenhagen keyboard=dk xkeyboard=dk no3d ramdisk=1G # free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15975 114 15351 32 509 15742 Swap: 4095 0 4095 # df -m Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 7986 1 7986 1% / /dev/sdb3 15999 10182 4982 68% /mnt-iso /dev/loop1 4249 4249 0 100% /mnt-system tmpfs 1024 3 1022 1% /ramdisk /dev/cloop 9691 9691 0 100% /KNOPPIX /dev/cloop1 451 451 0 100% /KNOPPIX1 unionfs 1024 3 1022 1% /usr tmpfs 20 4 17 16% /run tmpfs 10 1 10 1% /UNIONFS/var/lock tmpfs 100 1 100 1% /UNIONFS/var/log tmpfs 2048 1 2048 1% /tmp udev 20 0 20 0% /dev tmpfs 2048 0 2048 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 1598 1 1598 1% /run/user/1000 tmpfs 1598 0 1598 0% /run/user/0

If I add the boot parameter ramdisk=8G I get thhis:

Code:

# cat /proc/cmdline lang=de video=vga16fb:off apm=power-off nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/isolinux/linux64 bootfrom=//KNOPPIX_V7.6.1DVD-2016-01-16-EN.iso lang=en tz=Europe/Copenhagen keyboard=dk xkeyboard=dk no3d ramdisk=8G # free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15975 114 15355 32 505 15742 Swap: 4095 0 4095 # df -m Filesystem 1M-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on rootfs 7986 1 7986 1% / /dev/sdb3 15999 10182 4982 68% /mnt-iso /dev/loop1 4249 4249 0 100% /mnt-system tmpfs 8192 3 8190 1% /ramdisk /dev/cloop 9691 9691 0 100% /KNOPPIX /dev/cloop1 451 451 0 100% /KNOPPIX1 unionfs 8192 3 8190 1% /usr tmpfs 20 4 17 16% /run tmpfs 10 1 10 1% /UNIONFS/var/lock tmpfs 100 1 100 1% /UNIONFS/var/log tmpfs 2048 1 2048 1% /tmp udev 20 0 20 0% /dev tmpfs 2048 0 2048 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 1598 1 1598 1% /run/user/1000 tmpfs 1598 0 1598 0% /run/user/0

The RAM disk size is different, but free shows nearly the same memory use.

Quote:

I have a Dell R900 with 128GB of RAM but no disks (I can't afford to buy any at this time). I created a Knoppix 7.6.1 Live USB drive using these instructions but when I booted up the system was consuming 64GB RAM in rootfs,

Why did you use this curious instruction of superuser.com instead of → Flash disk install?
To see, what's going wrong please tell us like the posting above your output of
cat /proc/cmdline
free -m
df -h

I reinstalled using the Flash disk install instructions. I don't recall how I came across those instead of the official instructions.

Code:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ cat /proc/cmdline lang=de video=vga16fb:off apm=power-off nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 BOOT_IMAGE=linux64 lang=en apm=power-off initrd=minirt.gz nomce libata.force=noncq hpsa.hpsa_allow_any=1 loglevel=1 ramdisk=1G

Code:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ free -m total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 128999 221 128411 8 366 128675 Swap: 4095 0 4095

Code:

knoppix@Microknoppix:~$ df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on rootfs 63G 48K 63G 1% / /dev/sda1 4.6G 4.2G 389M 92% /mnt-system tmpfs 1.0G 0 1.0G 0% /ramdisk /dev/cloop 9.5G 9.5G 0 100% /KNOPPIX /dev/cloop1 451M 451M 0 100% /KNOPPIX1 /dev/sda2 26G 4.7M 26G 1% /KNOPPIX-DATA unionfs 26G 4.7M 26G 1% /usr tmpfs 20M 3.2M 17M 16% /run tmpfs 10M 0 10M 0% /UNIONFS/var/lock tmpfs 100M 56K 100M 1% /UNIONFS/var/log tmpfs 2.0G 32K 2.0G 1% /tmp udev 20M 0 20M 0% /dev tmpfs 2.0G 0 2.0G 0% /dev/shm tmpfs 612M 4.0K 612M 1% /run/user/1000