Puppy developer news:

from 2.15ce to 2.16

default vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 initrd=initrd.gz pmedia=usbflash ramdisk_size=93984

The older "ram disk" mechanism created a synthetic block device out of
an area of ram and used it as backing store for a filesystem. This block
device was of fixed size, so the filesystem mounted on it was of fixed
size. Using a ram disk also required unnecessarily copying memory from the
fake block device into the page cache (and copying changes back out), as well
as creating and destroying dentries. Plus it needed a filesystem driver
(such as ext2) to format and interpret this data.

Compared to ramfs, this wastes memory (and memory bus bandwidth), creates
unnecessary work for the CPU, and pollutes the CPU caches. (There are tricks
to avoid this copying by playing with the page tables, but they're unpleasantly
complicated and turn out to be about as expensive as the copying anyway.)
More to the point, all the work ramfs is doing has to happen _anyway_,
since all file access goes through the page and dentry caches. The ram
disk is simply unnecessary, ramfs is internally much simpler.

Another reason ramdisks are semi-obsolete is that the introduction of
loopback devices offered a more flexible and convenient way to create
synthetic block devices, now from files instead of from chunks of memory.

   Hello everyone,

   The storage array holding most of our Linux distributions crashed hard. 
Rather than spend over $600 to resurrect 5 year-old hardware that is out 
of warranty and was beginning to show signs of failing prior to last 
night, we will be speeding up our migration of the distributions onto our 
new Netapp disks.

   This means much more space on much more stable hardware, but it will 
mean waiting until we hear back on a few small technical questions before 
we can create the volume and populate it with data.

   We sincerely apologize for this outage, and hope to have the volume 
accessible again by tomorrow.