4 ms·

Pre-NT? Are you sure? My understanding of history is that the PE file format was part of NT 3. I would have thought that earlier systems kept as much paged as p

• CamperBob2 11y ago
  In userland, the DISCARDABLE and MOVABLE flags date back at least to Windows 3. Not sure about the kernel.
  • munin 11y ago
    That would have been a different file format though, right?
    • CamperBob2 11y ago
      Yes, but the point is that movable/discardable flags are an old-school hack that probably shouldn't have made it into modern binary file formats to begin with.
      • munin 11y ago
        Memory pressure didn't go away with NT 3.1 though... probably in Windows Vista it could have gone away...
• phaemon 11y ago
  > I do remember a time when you could boot Windows XP on a system with 64MB of RAM when you needed special configuration / custom kernels to boot Linux on such a system. No, you're misremembering. A Linux kernel has never needed anywhere near that much RAM to boot. The first machine I used Linux on had 8MB RAM and that was considered plenty at the time. I do remember KDE being pretty slow on a machine with 64MB...maybe you're thinking of desktop environments.
  • bluecmd 11y ago
    Or fat initrds
  • rleigh 11y ago
    Yep. The smallest I've seen IIRC was a 386 with 4MB running X11 back around 1998. Took a good time to boot and start X11, but it did work.
    • jjuhl 11y ago
      My first X86 machine running Linux was a 386DX/33 with 4MB of RAM. It booted the Linux 0.96 kernel (IIRC) just fine and I also used X on that machine. As far as I remember, I did have 16MB swap as well to make things actually usable, but the kernel itself would boot just fine with just the 4MB RAM. If memory serves me right, it was actually possible to get the kernel to boot with as little as 2MB in those days, but that was the limit. I remember a custom kernel compile on this machine took a little over 24 hours. :-/