• @[email protected]
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    6019 hours ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      3918 hours ago

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

      • @[email protected]
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        2218 hours ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
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        18 hours ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
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          318 hours ago

          Gotcha - I thought you meant you had seen some sort of demo/article/whatever with a proof of concept, but I misunderstood.

    • @[email protected]
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      218 hours 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