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There's a bunch of nice chips with onboard ram now. This is yet another one with 64MB. Ideally I'd love to have at least 512MB of ram. I realize that's overkil

There's a bunch of nice chips with onboard ram now. This is yet another one with 64MB. Ideally I'd love to have at least 512MB of ram. I realize that's overkill for a lot of applications, but it'd give me confidence it can run a reasonably competent Linux userland.

speed_spread 3y ago
I'm pretty certain 64MB is enough for a tailor made Linux distro. What's most important is for the CPU to have an MMU to manage virtual memory. Otherwise, you're staying in microcontroller flatland where any app can access any address.
- BasedAnon 3y ago
  64MB was good enough for Black Rhino Linux
- hayley-patton 3y ago
  Linux has a nommu configuration, no? Obviously no good for security, and it is still flatland, but a flatland running Linux.
- brucehoult 3y ago
  64 MB is enough to run full modern Fedora or Ubuntu in "server" mode, ssh in and run emacs, compile smallish programs using gcc. Try it right here: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33-riscv.cfg&mem=64 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33... It's slow the first time as it loads things over the network, but once files are cached in the browser it takes 5 seconds to boot to a shell prompt and 2.5 seconds to gcc compile helloworld. You can run GNU "screen" to make a couple of panes and run "top" in one and see there is a good amount of free RAM even when running emacs. This JS emulation runs at around the speed of maybe a 200 MHz CPU. The 1 GHz C906 in the Milk-V Duo is probably about five times faster, and the 480 MHz C910 in the BL808 chip on the M1s and Ox64 is several times faster as well. Quite usable speed, comparable to the original Raspberry Pi. Just not enough RAM to run a modern GUI is all.
  - rektide 3y ago
    I'd love to be able to bring more of my regular tools with me. Run a small prometheus instance, a small samba instance, a postgres database. On a 128MB wifi router this all & a lot of other small utils fits okay ish, runs fine, while routing. 256MB vastly preferred.
    - brucehoult 3y ago
      I have no idea of the needs of prometheus. Samba and postgres should be fine on a machine with more than 32 MB free. Hell, in the late 90s I was running that kind of stuff on Linux on a Pentium with 32 MB total RAM, not >32 MB free after booting.
      - rektide 3y ago
        It'd all fit barely. But gee it's getting tight. It just feels to me not worth fighting. And I'd want a couple small apps running too, & maybe not small native C things but like some smallish node.js things. Wifi routers tend to be much bigger class devices but 128mb is very common, 256 pretty establishdd. It's just nice not feeling super space constrainted. This isn't rocket science, we shouldn't have to obsess over payload size. The cost should be so small. Albeit yet at scale some folks do have cause to pinch those pennies, it's not a good general computing path.

speed_spread 3y ago

I'm pretty certain 64MB is enough for a tailor made Linux distro. What's most important is for the CPU to have an MMU to manage virtual memory. Otherwise, you're staying in microcontroller flatland where any app can access any address.

BasedAnon 3y ago
64MB was good enough for Black Rhino Linux
hayley-patton 3y ago
Linux has a nommu configuration, no? Obviously no good for security, and it is still flatland, but a flatland running Linux.
brucehoult 3y ago
64 MB is enough to run full modern Fedora or Ubuntu in "server" mode, ssh in and run emacs, compile smallish programs using gcc. Try it right here: https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33-riscv.cfg&mem=64 https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33... It's slow the first time as it loads things over the network, but once files are cached in the browser it takes 5 seconds to boot to a shell prompt and 2.5 seconds to gcc compile helloworld. You can run GNU "screen" to make a couple of panes and run "top" in one and see there is a good amount of free RAM even when running emacs. This JS emulation runs at around the speed of maybe a 200 MHz CPU. The 1 GHz C906 in the Milk-V Duo is probably about five times faster, and the 480 MHz C910 in the BL808 chip on the M1s and Ox64 is several times faster as well. Quite usable speed, comparable to the original Raspberry Pi. Just not enough RAM to run a modern GUI is all.
- rektide 3y ago
  I'd love to be able to bring more of my regular tools with me. Run a small prometheus instance, a small samba instance, a postgres database. On a 128MB wifi router this all & a lot of other small utils fits okay ish, runs fine, while routing. 256MB vastly preferred.
  - brucehoult 3y ago
    I have no idea of the needs of prometheus. Samba and postgres should be fine on a machine with more than 32 MB free. Hell, in the late 90s I was running that kind of stuff on Linux on a Pentium with 32 MB total RAM, not >32 MB free after booting.
    - rektide 3y ago
      It'd all fit barely. But gee it's getting tight. It just feels to me not worth fighting. And I'd want a couple small apps running too, & maybe not small native C things but like some smallish node.js things. Wifi routers tend to be much bigger class devices but 128mb is very common, 256 pretty establishdd. It's just nice not feeling super space constrainted. This isn't rocket science, we shouldn't have to obsess over payload size. The cost should be so small. Albeit yet at scale some folks do have cause to pinch those pennies, it's not a good general computing path.