Is it worth it to compile your own Kernel for performance?
23 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:But I still don't know how you can get that number to 2 digits
Disabling services and other useless software.
23 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:and also not even touching the Kernel.
As I already said before, the Kernel is the least of your worries when it comes to ram usage.
24 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:Like I am pretty sure I heard somewhere like either today or 10 years ago (I don't remember), The Linux Kernel takes at least 64 MB to boot up.
Nah, you can boot the kernel itself in less than 1MB, and even have SSH and networking with ~1MB of RAM, but that's basically just the kernel and some core components, not useful for a desktop system.
26 minutes ago, Gat Pelsinger said:Can't believe I forgot this but I did an experiment running Linux in a very tight memory environment. If I can remember, the system (not just the Kernel but also Arch) at least required a bare minimum of 200 MB without SWAP to just boot up and not panic when rebooting.
That's mostly due to other software that the system tries to start on boot, you can get a pretty minimal install if you want. As an example, here's an archbang vm install with some stuff disabled and ctwm + xterm:
Less than 200mb, using systemd (which does take it fair share of ram), without swap. Systemd takes around 10mb of ram in total:
And here's top sorted by memory:
If you were to forgo systemd and some other quality of life stuff you can easily go below 100MB usage. Xorg alone takes almost 20MB lol
You can also disable some unused kernel modules (without actually rebuilding the kernel) to shave some extra ram.
If you want to go extreme, replace glibc with musl. Such an example of extremely minimalist distro is glaucus: https://github.com/glaucuslinux/glaucus
Alpine can also idle with really low ram usage, and it's closer to a real-life, production-ready distro.
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