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void-linux
Base System Requirements Testing
I took these values straight off of the wiki. I can only assume they were somewhat stale. It would be nice if these were tested, and especially with some context of what can be done with these minimal stats.
We did update the storage requirements in #33 however keep in mind this was purely for a base-system with no room for any other packages (no bootloader, lvm, cryptsetup, nothing). Whether this should be clarified or changed in the docs to reflect that should maybe be considered.
We also state this in the docs as it currently stands:
Void can be installed on very minimalist hardware, though we recommend the following minimums for most installations:
which kind of suggests that those space requirements are already a bit higher than the actual bare minimum to sucessfully install.
As for memory, I'm not really sure how to test this. It kind of seems like the 96M figure is arbitrary, but at the same time it should run fine on low-memory systems as long as there is swap space allocated. However, I'm not sure what we should recommend to users.
Perhaps we could do something like Debian and give a little more wiggle room in the recommendation with a disclaimer that the true requirement may be less:
...
Install Type RAM (minimum) RAM (recommended) Hard Drive No desktop 128 megabytes 512 megabytes 2 gigabytes With Desktop 256 megabytes 1 gigabyte 10 gigabytes The actual minimum memory requirements are a lot less than the numbers listed in this table. Depending on the architecture, it is possible to install Debian with as little as 60MB (for amd64). The same goes for the disk space requirements, especially if you pick and choose which applications to install; see Section D.2, “Disk Space Needed for Tasks” for additional information on disk space requirements. ...
I like this direction for this. It's certainly not a huge issue, but maybe just some clarification of what these numbers actually mean would be helpful. I'm really busy at the moment, but maybe some testing in memory restricted VMs to check requirements and performance would be useful. This is not anything urgent, just something I was wondering about.
I wonder if there are any ideas on this because I find memory requirements to be extremely arbitrary and dependent on the use-case.
I'm totally swamped with work. @the-maldridge, do you have any opinion on this? I like the idea of more real world recommendations like 128MB, or just more clarification on what you can do with the bare minimum. Something like what Debian has might be good.