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[–] 73 points 2 years ago (8 children)

I've seen builds of the Linux kernel that comfortably fits in my on-die CPU caches.

So it would just be a picture of an empty sofa.

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  • [–] 45 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    There are mid range CPUs with 128MB of L3 cache now. A Linux distro like Tiny Core could fit entirely in cache.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Tiny Core Linux is a minimal Linux kernel based operating system focusing on providing a base system using BusyBox and FLTK. It was developed by Robert Shingledecker, who was previously the lead developer of Damn Small Linux.

    Ah, that explains a lot! Didn't know about TCL.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (2 children)
  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 child)

    Hm? Do you mean a link to builds that are this small? My midrange Intel i5-12600K (I'm a working man, doc...) L3 cache is 20,971,520 bytes. My Linux Mint (basically Ubuntu kernel) vmlinuz right now is only 14,952,840 bytes. Sure, that's a compressed kernel image not uncompressed, but consider this is a generic kernel built to run most desktops applications very comfortably and with wide hardware support. It's not too hard to imagine fitting an uncompressed kernel into the same amount of space. Does that help to show they're roughly on the same order of magnitude?

    Ten years old kernels could be 2 MB.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    My ARM board from 2010 has 256MB of memory. It runs an old 3.1 kernel (not attached to internet) , new kernels won't fit/load. But on that I have OpenMediaVault running SAMBA shares and mindlna to serve music. It isn't even using 50% of the 256MB

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