Feasible Concept? Booting to local RAM Filesystem

[Richard]

Once booted, I will still need network connectivity - both for central control of the testing, and also to test networking. I'm just trying to remove external dependencies. We've got a fairly specific set of tests that we need to run, as well as megacli settings to configure the RAID controller specifically, so I think rolling our own is probably necessary to keep it self-contained.

The link I posted looks like it'll get me 90% of where I want to be, and I'm probably best served by cloning his method to start, and then resuming the search.

Why do I even care about cutting the ISO out of the process? Two reasons... First, to reduce the RAM footprint; this is based purely on my readings that initrd booting an ISO ends up doubling the size of the filesystem in RAM. But also because I want every node to act as a boot server for subsequent nodes - if I need to serve up an ISO, that's yet a third copy I need to keep in RAM. But if I can serve up the working filesystem, I only need to have one copy locally.