Because AmnesiaOS runs entirely in RAM, your machine’s physical memory is both the operating environment and the working filesystem. Unlike a traditional OS that uses disk storage to extend its effective memory through swap, AmnesiaOS has no swap — every byte of working space comes from installed RAM. This makes RAM capacity the most directly relevant hardware factor: more RAM means more room for the OS and any work you do in the session.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://mintlify.com/damianiglesias/amnesiaOS/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
x86_64 is the only supported CPU architecture in the current release. 32-bit x86, ARM, RISC-V, and other architectures are not supported at this time.
Minimum Requirements
| Component | Minimum | Recommended |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | x86_64 | x86_64 |
| RAM | 512 MB | 1 GB+ |
| Storage | USB drive or bootable media | USB drive or bootable media |
| Firmware | BIOS or UEFI | BIOS or UEFI |
RAM Considerations
AmnesiaOS has a very small in-memory footprint. Once the system is running, RAM is consumed roughly as follows:| Component | Approximate Size |
|---|---|
| Linux kernel (6.16.1) | ~15 MB |
| initramfs image | ~10 MB |
| Total OS overhead | ~25 MB |
tmpfs root, or any memory-intensive tooling — 1 GB or more of RAM is recommended. Because there is no swap, all working memory must fit within available physical RAM.
Supported Firmware
AmnesiaOS ships with GRUB 2.12 as its bootloader. The ISO is built usinggrub-mkrescue, which embeds both a BIOS (PC-BIOS / CSM) bootloader and an EFI bootloader in a single hybrid image. This means:
- Legacy BIOS systems can boot the ISO without any firmware configuration changes beyond setting boot order.
- UEFI systems can boot from the EFI partition embedded in the ISO.
Storage Media
The AmnesiaOS ISO must be written to a USB drive (or other bootable block device) using a raw image writer such asdd:
vmlinuz) and initramfs (initramfs.img) from the USB drive and loads them entirely into RAM. Once that transfer is complete, the OS runs without any further disk access.
A planned v1.0.0 milestone will store a SquashFS root image on the USB drive. At boot it will be copied entirely into RAM, a pivot_root will switch the root filesystem to RAM, and the USB drive will be unmounted — leaving the system with zero dependency on any storage device while running.