[indiana-discuss] Memory size requirement of Indiana

[Martin Bochnig]

Aubrey Li wrote:
> On Nov 8, 2007 10:12 AM, Sanjay Nadkarni <Sanjay.Nadkarni at sun.com> wrote:
>   
>> Shawn Walker wrote:
>>     
>>> On 07/11/2007, Aubrey Li <aubreylee at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> One of my colleagues complains Indiana can't install on his 256M-memory box.
>>>> He said the Indiana installer demands at least 512M memory, is that true?
>>>> If so, can this issue be worked around?
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> It's true for now; I believe there is work to reduce it in the future.
>>>
>>>       
>> To be precise, there may be some work to reduce the size of microroot
>> which will enable a live CD to boot on systems with less 512MB.  However
>> there are no specific  plana on making it  install on 256 MB systems.
>> However, that does not preclude someone from creating a new distro
>> (using the distro constructor + some work:-) that would address this
>> class of systems.
>>
>>     
> So we'll boot on systems with less 512MB memory by livdCD. But we can't install.
> This doesn't make any sense!
>
> Is there any reason why 256MB systems doesn't work? The whole CD is just ~700MB,
> what eat up the available memory?
>
> -Aubrey
>   


Hello,

you misunderstood: There are efforts to get it booted and / or installed 
on systems with less than 512MB, eg. 384MB.
But nobody is *currently* working on going down to support systems with 
a config as low as just 256MB.

What eats up the mem: The root image needs to be fully copied into its 
associated ramdisk, and hence mem.
That has to do with how the Grub-based Newboot framework happens to be 
implemented (for various good reasons). If you wanna reduce mem 
requirements, your only option is to put things out of the mini-, micro- 
or ultra-micro root-fs image.
Certain people, including Moinak Ghosh, Sanjay Nadkarni and certainly 
others are striving to further reduce the size of the root image.
And have done a very good job already.


--
MBO