minimum memory requirements

[Jeremy Katz]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 14:08 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 09:07 -0700, Jesse Keating wrote:
> > On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 10:44 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> > > 
> > > To be fair, they probably didn't have a desktop to carry along for the
> > > ride. But then I guess I could counter that the problem here is I
> > > couldn't even run the installer with less than 384MB RAM. I dropped it
> > > down to 256MB after install but then had to bump it back up again - and
> > > I expect the first time I run yum I'll want to put it back to 512MB.
> > > 
> > > I had been trying to reduce VM memory sizes to run more at once...
> > 
> > You haven't yet stated your install type and method, which can make a
> > huge difference.
> 
> Ah, this was rawhide done from a boot.iso image.
> 
> > Graphical install type, booted from just vmlinuz and initrd.img and
> > subsequently downloading stage2 from the network is going to have
> > a /much/ higher memory footprint than if you were to boot from boot.iso
> > (which has stage2 on it), do a text mode install from whatever method.
> 
> True, I know I could just do a text mode install.
> 
> > You see, if you have to download stage2, you're downloading it to memory
> > based filesystem and losing that much memory just to the storage of the
> > file.
> 
> I'm not sure that's the case any more though. There used to be a stage1
> and a stage2 image for Anaconda, but now I think it's all a live image
> within that 100+ MB boot.iso file, without a separate download stage2.
> Perhaps I'll do another install later and switch to the console (it's
> cool that there's a usable shell early on now too) to check tmpfs.

No, there's still a separate first and second stage.  The first stage is
larger due to us using standard system functionality like NetworkManager
and there's no longer a (not-so-)minimal stage2 image as the size
difference was getting close to zero.

If you're booting from CD, the problem is that we have to copy the
stage2 off of the CD and into RAM so that you can later change CDs to
put in installation CDs.  There's unfortunately not much of a way around
it

Jeremy