Re: More RAM - a bad trend for m68k debian
Stephen R Marenka schrieb:
> How much will handtuning really help? If it's a great deal, then maybe
> we should adopt them for the platform. We need real numbers those, not
> handwaving.
I can give quite precise numbers on that one. I have implemented the
upper "Lean Linux from Scratch" on a laptop with 486dx33/4MB and it
works (mostly, at least as a proof of concept). Caveats: No X, still
some serious swapping. But software like joe, mutt, elvis, sc, minicom
etcpp runs very nice. No installer, you have to do EVERYTHING by hand,
starting from fdisk over mkswap and editing /etc/fstab ist not the last
thing to do.
Some data, handtuning the kernel reduced its memory footprint from
2,5MB to 0,9MB, using ulibc and ash instead of libc and bash as init
reduce app-memory from 3,2MB to 0,4MB. Lean Linux is nothing for the
fainthearted, everything is handtuned.
See also http://www.superant.com/smalllinux/, running linux with as
little as 2MB of RAM. Back in 1994 I actually used Linux 1.0.9 on a
386sx16 with 2,5MB.
I pretty much doubt this "Lean Linux" approach can be implemented in
Debian and still be called Debian. Too many things differ completely
from Debian. Different libc, different scripts, handselected software,
lots of compiling, no package management and if we had package
management it wouldn't even come close to nowadays dependencies.
On implementing lower requirements on debian I'll give a seperate reply.
Christian Brandt
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