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

[Jim]

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As I stated in an earlier email I am out of date on this but in the "old 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.

> 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.