4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoOr fat initrds
- rleigh 11y agoYep. 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 agoMy 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. :-/