Hi Finn,
Am 17.11.2018 um 11:49 schrieb Finn Thain:
On Fri, 16 Nov 2018, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
The EBSA110 is probably in a similar boat - I don't remember whether it
had 16MB or 32MB as the maximal amount of memory, but memory was getting
tight with some kernels even running a minimalist userspace.
So, it's probably time to say goodbyte to the kernel support for these
platforms.
Your call.
Note that removing code from mainline won't help users obtain older,
smaller, -stable kernel releases, free from the bug we were discussing.
(The bug appeared in Linux v2.6.32.)
BTW, if you did want to boot Linux on a 16 MB system, you do have some
options.
https://lwn.net/Articles/741494/
https://lwn.net/Articles/608945/
https://tiny.wiki.kernel.org/
Contributing to this kind of effort probably has value for IoT
deployments. I suspect it also cuts a small amount of bloat from a large
number of other Linux systems.
I boot 4.19 on a system with 14 MB RAM - 10 MB remain for user space
once the kernel loads. After remote login, 4 MB of that remain free for
buffers or user code (1.5 MB swapped).
That's with sysvinit - Christian tried to boot a systemd userland on his
Falcon once, and ran out of memory before swap could be activated.
I shouldn't say 16 or 32 MB are hopeless. And the 2.6 kernels were a lot
more sluggish to my recollection.
Cheers,
Michael
