X11 on small systems?

[Joseph Smith]

On 09/13/2010 06:20 PM, Joseph Smith wrote:
> 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.
>

and of course it works well with tinyx.

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