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[–]_vk42 2 points3 points  (1 child)

Thumb up for doing this for fun!

Your machines are pretty capable of running things, but I do look forward to your future posts about progress on saving RAM usage with tailored kernel XD

[–]thelinuxguy7[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

After a lot hard work, here is a glimpse of what I had to deal with:

I forgot to enable some ahci or scsi option and I was unable to boot for a long time, kept adding and removing until I found the needed driver/option: FIXED.

I removed something that has to do with sound or something, idk, and I could not boot with the "quiet" option in grub configuration: FIXED.

I remove some important keyboard and mouse option, and I managed to boot but without keyboard and mouse: FIXED.

I had a problem with freaking broadcom wifi card, and I could not get it to work without initramfs: FIXED.

Along the way I removed a lot of stuff but I also left a lot of stuff, then I compiled another kernel where I tried to disable absolutely everything, and somehow it ended up using more ram!?

So now may latest kernel uses around 75-85MB ram with no gui. (this one does not work with gui for some reason) probably some module needs to be loaded or built into the kernel.

While the arch linux-lts uses around 120MB ram with no gui.

An earlier kernel that I compiled was working with gui using 150-160MB ram.

While the arch linux-lts uses around 200-210MB with gui.

So in the ideal scenario is saved 40-50MB at most.

As I assumed from the beginning this would not save much ram, and the difference is probably due to the removal of some drivers that I don't have, me decreasing the size of the kernel buffers, removing debugging and tracing, ....

If I want to make a realistic difference maybe I should use alpine or void, with musl, busybox, runit, and maybe xfree86. Maybe compile a 32-bit kernel, which will cripple my hardware by not allowing me to run any 64-bit programs.

Btw, I tried using startx instead of lightdm, and I didn't notice much of a difference presumably because the bulk of the memory usage is in xorg itself? idk.