On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Rob OpenSuSE <rob.opensuse.linux@googlemail.com> wrote:
2009/1/10 Larry Stotler <larrystotler@gmail.com>:
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 12:12 AM, Matt Sealey <matt@genesi-usa.com> wrote:
of work but it's definitely possible to knock KDE4 down so it's basically featureless (exactly like you want it) with barely anything done on startup except get into X and start networking.
Which shows me it's just not a compelling alternative. The devs seems to have fallen into the "it's there, let's waste it" trap. They have
Actually Qt4 and KDE4 have not increased memory consumption particularly according to my observations.
There has been stuff added which is a matter of configuration. 11.1 just has a lot of issues right now, but testing pre-release on even 8 yr old hardware, I had acceptable performance for occasional desktop use.
Alot of ppl with much newer machines have complained of performance problems, so I think such a sweeping generalisation as the "it's there, let's waste it" trap comment, is as erroneous as the 1GiB RAM requirement.
It runs great in 256MB and 512MB. As well as you could expect any OS that does that to run in them - which is to say, fairly usable. I remember back in the days when Windows 2000 was a limited beta and it would install on a system with 24MB of memory. It ran like crap. Systems with 32MB of memory - now, you could run Office on those! The limiting factor was NOT the slow processors (30-60MHz Pentiums) or the lack of RAM, but that when it DID swap, the ancient IDE controllers would effectively lock the machine up. If you put a pretty decent Promise IDE card in there (we're talking ATA66, I still have that card) the whole thing would just pop to life. In later betas and the final release they bumped the requirement to 64MB to gain a sort of baseline performance expectation. That is not to say that it would not run in 24MB anymore (at least it would just flake out during install because of a requirements check but you could just swap in 64MB to install, and then go back to a lower size.. easily possible if you're using Ghost or PartitionMagic to push sysprepped images), but there are many, many things that go with a system that only has 24MB which limit performance far more. We can bring this into the future somewhat, and point out that the only reason the Efika (400MHz G2 PowerPC, no L2 cache, 128MB DDR2) runs it so badly is because it has no DMA-enabled ATA driver. The processor is fast, the memory is fast, but lack of fast swap space really lets it down. I cannot imagine you would ever have a PC with even 256MB that could not get by with KDE4 - I actually have KDE4 running on my Via EPIA M1000 as of last week now, and at 1GHz and with 256MB RAM, it's fine, fine, fine (my only disappointed moment was when I found the unichrome driver sucks, as does the unichrome DRI which will not load, so I could not spin a desktop cube around. But otherwise it was snappy.). So, KDE4 has reduced memory requirements and Qt4 is far better optimized and more efficient, so where is the problem? Well, I'd say, it's avahi-daemon, postfix, powerd, beagle, pick any daemon which starts up at boot, or before the desktop, which has doubled in number from 10.3 to 11.1 - I can't nitpick at the accessibility daemons but the amount of stuff loaded on boot has gotten way out of control. Let's consider something like the FUSE filesystem. Now, this does not take too long to load, or take up too much memory, but it is a good example of the operation. boot.fuse brings this up at boot time, way before the desktop and way, way after everything has been pulled from fstab. This may be necessary to, for instance, load the users' Windows drive and mount it for the desktop. But why not make it so that this drive's filesystem is only detected, drivers loaded, filesystems mounted, as and when the user ACTUALLY goes to access it? When you click a USB stick, it mounts, VFS layers kick in, and FUSE modules are loaded. Do you really need the kernel driver around for 5 days before a user does this? Can't the module be loaded on-demand, kept around until memory pressure or something else hits it? The same would be true of anything else. Postfix is another example of something which is just too big for its boots. How many people actually really configure their system so that SMTP mail goes directly through this daemon? It's only there because cron needs an SMTP daemon. A user with a Netbook would never care. Debian etc. use ssmtp which is much smaller, fulfils the requirements exactly, and does not contain a full SMTP/LMTP compliant mail solution with filters and scripting and a full mail queue which gets started on boot and only hangs around waiting for a cron job to fail. It takes ages to start, and soaks up resources. If someone really does need postfix, they can grab a postfix pattern, I mean.. why not? Or, what if they like exim better? Postfix is hard to uninstall once it's there for a novice who wants to get rid of it :) I am sure there are plenty of other things which could be deferred as services (is this even possible with init or any other boot process?) until really needed, or simply cut out or replaced with lower-resource-using systems. The obvious trick is to use memory when you need it, load things when they're about to be used.. even Windows manages to install a billion services on a system, but Windows Installer is only started when you're installing something, Windows Live Communications Platform is only started when you start Windows Live apps, IMAPI CD burning doesn't start unless I'm about to burn a CD. VirtualBox doesn't start it's service until you're loading VirtualBox. And Contrast VMware which manages to soak up 200MB of auth, nat, disk mounting and dhcp relay daemons before you even start a VM.. and this is just from VMware Player (which I have not run since I installed it) -- Matt Sealey <matt@genesi-usa.com> Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org