lowish RAM boot ability of WDL_Arch64

[wiak]

WDL_Arch64 full desktop is probably the largest WeeDogLinux available. It is pretty full on...

That doesn't mean however that it needs a machine with much capability to use it. I run it as my main OS on my old 2008 HP Elitebook 2530p laptop (intel core2duo). It runs fine and fast with 2GB RAM and using Arch Chromium browser.

Nevertheless, just for fun, I decided to quickly see how much RAM I needed to boot and use it successfully (I didn't run Chromium though - that would be asking too much)...

Successfully using apps in WDL_Arch64 full desktop with 164 MB system RAM (throttled via grub kernel mem=XXXM line)

So I played around with mem=XXXM on the grub kernel line to limit memory.

To help me do this I first forced WDL_Arch64 to boot to commandline only (there is a 'hidden' command to do this on the system...).

So initially, I booted without any swap at all with the low RAM I set via mem=XXXM. In my lowish RAM boot test it certainly all worked fine at the commandline and without needing swap. Of course it could not start X with low memory without some swap, so prior to startx I activated a previously created 1GB swapfile with command:

Code: Select all

swapon swapfile

To cut a long story short, X and desktop started up fine thereafter. Please see the 'free' and 'top' results in the attached Screenshot, which show case where I was booting with 164MB RAM... As you can see WDL_Arch64 will indeed work successfully on lowish RAM systems. Probably at least as good if not better than most any distro around here. Other WeeDogLinux distros (including WDL_Void32) will do even better than this and WDLGO commandline systems should boot fine in very low RAM indeed (though I have not tested further). As for running large apps like Chromium - hmmm, too much swap use for that, but editors and PCMANFM filemanager and mtpaint all run fine with that low system RAM configuration on WDL_Arch64.

EDIT: Oh, by the way, I didn't use 01firstrib_rootfs.sfs for the main rootfs overlayfs layer. Instead I used uncompressed raw 01firstrib_rootfs as the layer (a special ability of WeeDogLinux systems) since I reckoned that would involve less RAM overhead, which it seemed to in quick second test (but no figures to prove that sorry).

EDIT2: By the way, with mem=256M and no swap at all, WDL_Arch64 did manage to boot to the full desktop. I was able to open pcmanfm filemanager okay (and maybe a simple xterm - I can't remember if I included that) but anything more than that used up the RAM too much and caused massive slow-down/freeze - I didn't wait long enough to see if it would crash thereafter.

wiak