X11 on small systems?

Joseph Smith joe at settoplinux.org
Mon Sep 13 18:20:50 EDT 2010


On 09/13/2010 05:07 PM, Tom Buskey wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
> <rozzin at geekspace.com <mailto:rozzin at geekspace.com>> wrote:
>
>     Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com <mailto:dragonhawk at gmail.com>>
>     writes:
>      >
>      > On Sun, Sep 5, 2010 at 10:12 PM, Joshua Judson Rosen
>      > <rozzin at geekspace.com <mailto: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.
>
>
You may also want to check out matchbox which is less than 1mb and works 
well with busybox and uclibc.

-- 
Thanks,
Joseph Smith
Set-Top-Linux
www.settoplinux.org


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