On 3/1/07, Dave Miner <Dave.Miner at sun.com> wrote: > > On what basis do you believe that we will end up requiring more memory? > Do you have data you can point to? And what do you think is a > reasonable memory requirement for a graphical installation? > > We believe that, when all's said and done, the Caiman GUI will require > no more memory than the current graphical installer. We don't have data > yet, either, but that's because we're only just starting to work out the > design issues for the changes needed in supporting the new > implementation. I'm expecting we'll be able to keep the required memory > around 512 MB for the graphical case.
I have serious concerns here as well, which is why I asked about caiman pulling in bits of gnome. I don't know about anybody else, but I regard the current memory minimum as excessive. The 768M minimum for the developer edition ought to be considered unacceptable. The install has to run and complete for pretty well any install configuration on systems with 512M memory. Why 512? For one, it's a fairly common configuration (particularly for those who might wish to reuse a not exactly cutting edge system to try Solaris - think of systems that can't run Vista as a target); for another, Sun still sell systems with 512M memory. (The latter implies to me that, with a 5-year support life, that it should be possible in 5 years time to install the then-current version of Solaris on such a machine.) I know that there is a trend - particularly over the last couple of years - for considerable amounts of bloat to have crept in, but realistically 512M is a lot of memory just to boot a machine and copy some files to a disk, so we shouldn't have any difficulty in getting into 512M and ought to be able to do much better. > We're absolutely thinking about the Solaris future, and with our limited > resources we actually tend to focus more on optimizing for that future > than on the past. We're not wholly insensitive to the desires of > developers who don't have the latest and greatest hardware, but by the > time Nevada becomes an actual Solaris release, does it make sense to > optimize our decision-making around, say, systems with a single 1 GHz > processor and 256 MB of memory? It doesn't seem likely to me. Again, Sun are still selling 1GHz machines - indeed, recently introduced new models at that speed. Sparc hardware tends to last forever, so we are going to have to live with that level of performance (and early US-III systems) for a long time to come. As for memory, 256 is probably a bit on the low side but such a machine would still be useful in many contexts so it ought to be possible, although the optimization point probably ought to be 512. -- -Peter Tribble http://www.petertribble.co.uk/ - http://ptribble.blogspot.com/
