X11 on small systems? (was: Qi-Hardware Nanonote group purchase?)

[Tom Buskey]

On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
<rozzin at geekspace.com>wrote:

> Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> writes:
> >
> > On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> > <rozzin at geekspace.com> wrote:
> > > > X reports a resident size of 40 MB, although how much of
> > > > that (if any) might actually be video card RAM I dunno.
> > >
> > > I bet none of it is video-card RAM; a significant (not necessarily
> > > majority, but significant) portion of the RAM `used by X', though,
> > > is shared libraries that are also used by other processes--and those
> > > are basically `gratis' since you'd be using them regardless.
> >
> >   I'm approaching the limits of my understanding now, but:
> >
> >   I note that several of the shared libraries you list are specific to
> > the X server, and thus aren't shared by any other process.
>
> Yes, however: several of the libraries that are exclusive to
> the X server are actually things that would (or could) be eliminated
> in different use-cases; the 4-MB Intel DRI module, for example,
> is unnecessary even on my laptop (unless I want accelerated 3-D,
> which I *almost* never do--even on my laptop); libfreetype could
> presumably be eliminated if we just used bitmap fonts (which is
> probably what one wants on a QVGA display, anyway).
>
> And, of course: there are plenty more, in the full listing,
> of all types--ones that are specific to the X server, ones that are
> specific to other applications (some of them X clients), and ones that
> are shared between all sorts of processes. I wasn't trying to prove you
> wrong (at all, let a lone by by slight of hand), just pointing out that
> there's deeper analysis necessary in order to actually figure out what
> the top-level memory-usage figures really mean.
>

http://tinycorelinux.com/ manages to get X trimmed down into a 10MB image
using 48MB of RAM.  With the 2.6 kernel.

The RAM requirements will be different on ARM.  I know I see differences
with BSD and Solaris on intel vs sparc.
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