From: Florian Fainelli <florian@openwrt.org>
To: Darren Hart <dvhart@linux.intel.com>
Cc: linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Minimal x86 memory requirements
Date: Tue, 15 Feb 2011 11:04:48 +0100 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <201102151104.48976.florian@openwrt.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <4D59C9D5.4080909@linux.intel.com>
Hello,
On Tuesday 15 February 2011 01:33:25 Darren Hart wrote:
> I'm looking to build a bare minimum x86 kernel that will boot and run
> busybox, nothing else (and eventually less than that). Assuming I do
> need USB-HID, IDE, and basic TCP/IP, what should I expect to be the
> least RAM I could get away with just to boot off flash, get a getty,
> login, and take a few directory listings.
>
> If anyone would like to point me where to RTFM, that would be
> appreciated as well :-)
OpenWrt runs currently on a RDC R-321x System-on-Chip which is i486 based [1]
and usually designed with 16MB of RAM, the bzImage itself is around 768KB w/
the following features built-in:
- TCP/IP networking
- MTD support for CFI compatible NOR flashes
- JFFS2/squashfs filesystem
When I load additionnal modules to be able to do NAT/USB/FAT filesystems for
instance, plus having must have daemons running (dnsmasq, dropbear, busybox,
hostapd ...), I still have around 3MB of available RAM (for a 16MB RAM
device). The filesystem itself is compressed using squashfs+lzma, and fits
within 3MB (loadable modules are inside, usable image at [2]).
So from my perspective, you should be able to do all of this with a 16MB RAM
device, plus 4 to 8MB of Flash to be confortable with storing your filesystem.
Hope that helps.
[1]: http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/openwrtdocs/hardware/airlink101/ar525w
[2]: http://downloads.openwrt.org/backfire/10.03.1-rc4/rdc/openwrt-rdc-
squashfs-ar525w.img
--
Florian
prev parent reply other threads:[~2011-02-15 10:04 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2011-02-15 0:33 Minimal x86 memory requirements Darren Hart
2011-02-15 2:39 ` Rob Landley
2011-02-15 10:04 ` Florian Fainelli [this message]
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=201102151104.48976.florian@openwrt.org \
--to=florian@openwrt.org \
--cc=dvhart@linux.intel.com \
--cc=linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for read-only IMAP folder(s) and NNTP newsgroup(s).