On Monday 26 August 2013 01:49:17 Yohan Pereira wrote: > 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
Well, familiarity was my main reason but actually i though gentoo fits anyway quite good on such weak systems? (well besides compiling on it) You get a small system which needs not much space and performs quite good. (thats why 5GB is actually enough for me - i don't store anything there). FreeBSD might be a good alternative and in case gentoo is to much pain i'll give it a try. :) BTW, i have an alix device at home which also has just 256MB Ram and while the CF-Card (where the gentoo system is stored) has 8GB now, i've started with an 4GB CF-Card and i did compile on this device - even (hardened)kernels :) That was ~3 years ago, now i cross-compile for this device. However, gentoo on such devices runs perfectly well and rock stable. :) mmike
