Re: Linux 3.2 in wheezy
On Wed, 8 Feb 2012, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> wrote:
> With Etch, 48 MB was enough. With Lenny, 64 MB was enough.
> With Squeeze, 96 MB is enough (the minimum is between 64 and
> 96 MB, I didn't care investigating). And with 96 MB, you can already
> run a DNS server, OpenVPN, or a (very basic) mail server. The issue
[...]
> In fact, the main issue when booting a VM with a low RAM footprint,
> is the size of the initrd, which over the years, is growing and growing,
> which means that you need a large amount of RAM to even load it.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/22/xen-and-swap/
In the time of Etch I did some tests to try and improve Xen swap performance.
My tests failed to give the result I desired but I demonstrated that an Etch
Xen DomU could boot with 13M of RAM, give bearable performance for Debian
package installation with 16M, and start giving reasonable performance for
Debian package installation with about 28M of RAM.
As you note the initrd size is an issue.
Also with recent versions we have things like udev that take up some RAM. But
it's not difficult to hack a DomU to not need such things.
There used to be hosting companies that would rent out virtual machines with
less than 128M of RAM. I am not aware of anyone who still does that as RAM
prices decrease and storage price/performance remains about the same it is
becoming a bad business model to force customers into swap.
https://www.xeneurope.com/clients/cart.php
Xen Europe still sells 128M Xen DomUs.
--
My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/
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