At 01:15 PM 12/8/02 +0000, Rolf Edlund wrote:
Originally to: james niland
jn> I know some people who run happily without a swap at all.
How low RAM can I use, without running a swap ? Can I for example do it on a 486
with 4 MB RAM ?
The way you ask this question, it has no real answer. How little memory a system can run with depends on what tasks it is doing. And the choice of CPU is pretty much irrelevant to this question (its only slight relevance is in the smaller size of CPU-specific kernels).
That said ... running any sort of Linux system in less than 8 MB of real (not swap) RAM poses special challenges ... most modern distros can't even install on such systems (only Slackware, I think, still offers a "low memory" install option) and you won't be able to do much with such a system. In practice, the smallest systems I've ever run without swap were 486s with 16 MB of RAM, and that was for special purpose systems like routers. While these days I routinely run my workstations without a swap partition, they have at least 256 MB of RAM.
--
-------------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"--------
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, California, USA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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