----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander E. Patrakov" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "LFS Developers Mailinglist" <lfs-dev@linuxfromscratch.org> Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 9:00 AM Subject: LFS size and hardware requirements
> Hello, > > Some newbies get caught by our advertisement (which might be true for older > versions of LFS, but is untested as of LFS-6.3): > > > It is not difficult to build an LFS system of less than 100 megabytes (MB), > > which is substantially smaller than the majority of existing installations. > > Does this still sound like a lot of space? A few of us have been working on > > creating a very small embedded LFS system. We successfully built a system > > that was specialized to run the Apache web server with approximately 8MB of > > disk space used. Further stripping could bring this down to 5 MB or less. Try > > that with a regular distribution! This is only one of the many benefits of > > designing your own Linux implementation. > > ...and attempt to build LFS on their slow 586-class computers with only 16 MB of > RAM. This is obviously a waste of time, both for them and for us. Additionally, > the mentioned 100 MB system obviously contains significant deviations from the > book and thus cannot be counted as LFS. > I agree for "586-class computers with only 16 MB" would give bad result if any. I have build IPCop in the past on a 586-class laptop with 160 MB memory in approximatly three days. Space on installation depend on what and how you install. IPCop version based on LFS-6.3 should install on a 256 flash disk. > P.S. I accept the challenge to "try that with a regular distribution". > > Proposal: > > 1) Remove this advertisement. > > 2) List hardware requirements (CPU, RAM, hard disk space) on the same page as > software host requirements, or immediately before it. These requirements should > be set so that the total build time (including all testsuites) is less than 8 > hours, and that the build process never needs to get into swap (the worst case > seems to be Chapter 5 gcc Pass1 when starting from a host that is based on gcc-3.3). > Hard disk space is a mandatory requirement. Disk requirement on IPCop is 2 GB free space before building. Indicative minimal memory could be somewhere between 128 MB. Recommended memory to build should more than 256 MB I have mesured IPCop 1.4 (is with gcc-3.3) building time on the same machine with 128 MB and 512 MB. 128 MB require 3 time more to build than with 512 MB memory. Time should not be a requirement but a guide line. Just say it take x time with this cpu, memory and disk. We all know the problem with heavy swap usage but it may happen a small part goes permanently in swap without a big slowdown. This happen to me on alpha (160 MB memory). Until that part remain permantly in swap, this is not a problem. Gilles -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/lfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page