On 25/08/13 at 09:50pm, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> I'd recommend cross-building just a kernel and modules locally and
> copying that to the vm, it will only be about 6 to 8M
>
>
> Some food for thought:
>
> I do question the wisdom though of running Gentoo on a VM like that.
> I've always found that Gentoo (despite all it's fantastic awesomeness
> elsewhere) is really not fitted for that specific task very well - it
> tends to be a lot of pain and not much gain.
>
> Why do you want Gentoo on the vm? Is there a very good reason, or is it
> because you are familiar with it?
>
> If the second reason, you might want to have a look at FreeBSD or one of
> the binary distros based of Gentoo like Sabayon. You might find the best
> of both worlds in that space.
Well I have a couple VM's running on 256 mb of RAM. While I'll admit I
initially chose gentoo because of familiarity. It seemed to work out fine
although I'll admit I've I haven't updated the kernel, just using the
kernel provided by the host. AFAIR the heaviest(memory wise) thing I did
on such a VM was running a java stock trading application in a virtual
screen that was accessed via VNC.
I've never had problems(yet) compiling gcc etc. I remeber being able to
compile faster than my laptop's aging core 2 due processor.
Currently I use one for my personal a mail server, quassel (irc client), tt-rss,
git/mecurial collaboration, development web hosting and other random stuff.
It hasn't borked on me yet but YMMV. Heres the output of free from the
VM.
$ free -m
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 246 231 15 0
14 157
-/+ buffers/cache: 59 187
Swap: 494 57 437
--
- Yohan Pereira
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference
between a mermaid and a seal.
-- Mark Twain
