Subject: 4MB

From: Philip Blundell <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 21:29:05 +0000

Hi.

What's the reason for enforcing a minimum limit of 4MB RAM?  I'd quite like to 
be able to boot Linux on my 2MB A3000 and similar machines.  Since the page 
size scales with the amount of RAM it probably wouldn't be quite as bad as one 
might think at first.

p.

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From: Russell King - ARM Linux Admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 16 Nov 1997 23:29:12 +0000 (GMT)

> size scales with the amount of RAM it probably wouldn't be quite as bad as one 

I used to support 2MB machines.  However, since the kernel takes 1MB of memory
minimum (directly after mounting the root fs with minimal config), it doesn't
really leave a lot of memory free for any programs (and not enough for init,
sh and swapon)...
   _____
  |_____| ------------------------------------------------- ---+---+-
  |   |        Russell King        [email-masked]        --- ---
  | | | |    http://www.arm.uk.linux.org/~rmk/home.html      /  /  |
  | +-+-+                                                     --- -+-
  /   |               THE developer of ARM Linux              |+| /|\
 /  | | |                                                     ---  |
    +-+-+ -------------------------------------------------  /\\\  |

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From: Philip Blundell <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 23:08:20 +0000

>really leave a lot of memory free for any programs (and not enough for init,

Surely you can run swapon in 1MB, can't you?  I guess maybe it needs to be a 
hand-pruned version, but it doesn't really have to do anything very 
complicated.

p.