On Thu, Jan 15, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Rob OpenSuSE
2009/1/15
: An X terminal setup, has very much reduced software requirements, a lot of what you require on your desktop then becomes 'bloat'. The right optimisation goes much deeper than, just "turning off uncessary services". It would be wrong to inconvience the majority, by reduced default functionality in that case.
No, Rob, because you're simply not taking in anything anyone is saying! It's not about "turning them off by default so nobody can use them", it's about turning off services which can be CONFIRMED as unused on the current system. Initrd building - a discussion you're also chipping into on this and another list - is one example of where you build something which only supports the desired drivers on the system. If your system uses pata_via and uhci, then these are put into the initrd so they can be loaded on early boot. This is determined by the state of the running system, and what udev did the last time it booted. Now, if you do not have LVM2 setup, dm-mod is still loaded and dm-mod is still started on boot. There is no need for this. The service can be deactivated without negative effect until someone needs to set up an LVM2 system. rpcbind/portmap is started, even though xinetd is not started and no NFS clients are installed. No other services depend on rpcbind/portmap on my Automatic Configuration-installed system. So why is it still enabled? When I install nfs-kernel-server and enable xinetd for some service, rpcbind should be pulled in by those as and when it is needed, for the best efficiency of resource usage.
And while a few years ago one of the benefits of Linux was that it ran on any old hardware, where Windows was not an option, this is not the case any more.
openSUSE is not Linux, it has always had suggested hardware that was much greater than typical embedded systems, because it is a general purpose server and desktop OS.
It's a testament to how great openSUSE is that it DOES boot and DOES
support our 128MB 400MHz board, but the trend seems to be that a
generic server or desktop will have many gigabytes of RAM and many
thousands of MHz of CPU and extremely fast peripherals. This is not
born out by the requirements to install the system - 256MB of RAM (on
the Efika we have to build a swap file on a USB key or activate an
already existing swap partition).
We realise we are on the shitty end of the stick here, but we've
noticed that the trend from 10.x to 11.x is that installation is fine,
but the installed system has been gaining more and more hard
dependencies on things that the vast majority of people may not even
have activated (LVM2 etc.)
--
Matt Sealey