linux-kernel - Re: 32-bit HIGHMEM and game console downstreams

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Message-Id: <afb4527e-3958-4b04-9bbf-d48e80616aa0@app.fastmail.com>
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2025 11:13:03 +0200
From: "Arnd Bergmann" <arnd@...db.de>
To: "Willy Tarreau" <w@....eu>
Cc: "Ash Logan" <ash@...quark.com>,
 "Christophe Leroy" <christophe.leroy@...roup.eu>,
 "linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org" <linuxppc-dev@...ts.ozlabs.org>,
 "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
 officialTechflashYT@...il.com, "A. Wilcox" <AWilcox@...cox-tech.com>,
 "Michael Ellerman" <mpe@...erman.id.au>
Subject: Re: 32-bit HIGHMEM and game console downstreams

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025, at 09:00, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 08:20:35AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> > The maintainer of that downstream claims to be able to boot modern 
>> > text-mode distros on the GameCube' 24MB, which I find really impressive!
>> 
>> On a simpler musl+busybox userland and even more feature reduced
>> kernel (no network, initramfs-only) I could get to ~10MB, but then it
>> doesn't really do anything besides showing a shell.
>
> When you build your systems from source and install only the necessary
> *files* (not packages) you can get much lower. Here's my reverse-proxy
> for example (aarch64):
>
>   $ df /
>   Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
>   /dev/ram0          11520 11520         0 100% /

Yes, that was what I did in my busybox example, which used a tiny
initramfs in the end. Your ramdisk itself is already bigger than
my total 10MB RAM here, but then it also does one thing instead
of nothing.

    Arnd