LinuxBBQ

Excellent! See, it can be done.

64-bit buildroot with evilwm, dillo, and feh working. mdev instead of eudev. Still a tiny system.

^ And a very useful workstation. Great job!

^^ nice work buildroot always seems to inspire and motivate.

evilwm on NetBSD 7.



Yes, that's right, it looks like all my other systems. Part of how I evaluate a new system is to see how hard it is to duplicate my default setup. I like NetBSD -- it's probably the easiest BSD I have used so far. I see why Chef likes it. The installer is easy to use, the installed system is small but usable, and the package manager is very nice.

^ very nice good to see :D I do similar when I compare systems.

EDIT: add link http://linuxbbq.org/bbs/viewtopic.php?f ... =20#p43265

Latest experiment. 64-bit Arch running with a custom kernel, busybox init, and mdev. No systemd, no udev. Starts X at 18M.

That's excellent for two reasons. EvilWM and it's not the usual Arch + OpenRC no systemd setup. Great stuff!!

^^ you put me to shame. Pidsley FTW!

^^^ amazing.

Wow wow wow, pidsley this is fantastic! When will this become mass produced? That my friend, is perfection. As usual, god damn you :) I'd download that in a split second!

Eh arch with just 18mb? I've read some things and most of them says that Debian is smaller than Arch in memory usage. So roughly said there are 3 options.

A) they don't know how to configure Arch
B) they are right, debian based is even smaller
C) I can make opensuse boot from a floppy, so fuck you theo :P

very nice pidsley.

^ theo, the more you add the bigger it gets (or in the case of distro vs distro: the less you add the smaller the initial memory usage is), this is not really distro-specific -- the question is rather: what do you remove, and how much, while still keeping it "usable". How much is kept in RAM, how quickly is it swapped, which services are running right after boot, and so on. So it is really A) you can make about any distro use more or less the same initial RAM. Even with Ubuntu - after a lot of apt-get autoremoving (epecially zeitgeist et al.) - you can have an initial RAM usage of around 40MB with systemd. To get under the mythical ~24MB RAM (that's about what you have on a normally configured Linux system in TTY1 without X) you have to kick some board tools. A custom kernel (and I guess in pidsley's case it is a no-initrd boot with only the needed hardware drivers in the kernel - correct me if I'm wrong) is the second step after eliminating userland resource hogs like daemons and "unimportant" processes like dbus, lpr, syslog or cron.

Fantastic Pidsley, just fantastic experiment.

^^ Thanks MB for making that clear. I've read something and they told that Arch would be bigger than Debian, that's why I mentioned it. It's an excellent job, that's for sure. In the not so long ago past I did some killing myself and tried something with a smaller (and specific) kernel. The result was a screwed up machine and a bit hairpulling, but at the end I learned a few things :)

pidsley wrote:Latest experiment. 64-bit Arch running with a custom kernel, busybox init, and mdev. No systemd, no udev. Starts X at 18M.

Nicely done experiment and implementation. That is really impressive for sure, and 64bit too. Nice.

Theo wrote:Eh arch with just 18mb? I've read some things and most of them says that Debian is smaller than Arch in memory usage. So roughly said there are 3 options.

I have heard this too, and it's part of why I did this experiment -- to show that it is possible to build a low-memory Arch system, and without systemd.

Generally speaking, Arch does use more memory than Debian. But as I think I have said before, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Arch could be using that memory to cache things for faster access, or doing any number of other useful things that could improve performance.

As for how to build a system this low on memory, bacon is correct that I use a custom kernel with no initrd and no modules, and only the drivers I need built in. I also use busybox init instead of systemd or sysv, wired networking with a static IP (no dhcp), and busybox mdev instead of udev. But the most important thing is that there are no daemons running -- look at the pstree. No cron, no dbus, no polkit, no dhcp, no ntpd, no udev, no crap.

This is just an experiment. The real test would be to us a system like this for several days (or longer) and see what memory and usability are like then. I used to use a CRUX system with busybox init as my main machine, but now I'm back on oldstable with sysv and I save the crazy stuff for the test boxes.

Memory use is really only a measure of memory use, and low-memory systems are just a thing I do for fun. Don't take them too seriously.

bacon is also right that you can make just about any Linux system use this much memory -- that was part of the point of the experiment.

For comparison, here is the same Arch system, booting with systemd and the stock kernel. Starts X with 51M used. Note the pstree.



And a Jessie netinstall, booting with systemd and the stock kernel. Starts X with 60M used. Note all the extra crap in the pstree.

dkeg wrote: Nicely done experiment and implementation. That is really impressive for sure, and 64bit too. Nice.

Truly impressive. Pidsley is king of the grill when it comes to pure efficiency and resource usage.

^ also king of the grill when it comes to "people say this shit is impossible - let's see if that's true"
love it. great stuff Pidsley :)