From: Alan Cox (iiitac@swan.pyr)
Date: 04/15/93


From: iiitac@swan.pyr (Alan Cox)
Subject: Re: Basic info on LINUX.
Date: 15 Apr 1993 12:45:34 GMT


> 2Mb is the absolute minimum you need

BZZT wrong. If you include only the things you really need - ie no scsi,
no tcp/ip, and only minix fs you can run some things in 1MB. If you trim
the kernel page tables and file buffers down you can combine this with
a shared lib init and getty and run many things.
I used a 1Mb 386 like this for a while to play games and edit documents.
Granted its no good for compiling (hello world took 4 minutes).

It's all a matter of what you use it for. The killer with linux is the
applications - notably some of the Gnu stuff and X. If someone ported
something like bcc386 from minix I'd expect a 1Mb machine wouldn't be
too bad for compiling either.

Alan