From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S934600AbaEFJUr (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2014 05:20:47 -0400 Received: from mx0.aculab.com ([213.249.233.131]:53618 "HELO mx0.aculab.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S934441AbaEFJUp convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Tue, 6 May 2014 05:20:45 -0400 From: David Laight To: "'Andi Kleen'" , "netdev@vger.kernel.org" CC: "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , "tom.zanussi@linux.intel.com" Subject: RE: A reduced Linux network stack for small systems Thread-Topic: A reduced Linux network stack for small systems Thread-Index: AQHPaLIs/67+aq2J9EOC0vxlfbVkoJszRFeg Date: Tue, 6 May 2014 09:18:25 +0000 Message-ID: <063D6719AE5E284EB5DD2968C1650D6D0F70CFB5@AcuExch.aculab.com> References: <1399328773-6531-1-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org> In-Reply-To: <1399328773-6531-1-git-send-email-andi@firstfloor.org> Accept-Language: en-GB, en-US Content-Language: en-US X-MS-Has-Attach: X-MS-TNEF-Correlator: x-originating-ip: [10.202.99.200] Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org From: Andi Kleen > There has been a lot of interest recently to run Linux on very small systems, > like Quark systems. These may have only 2-4MB memory. They are also limited > by flash space. I'm intrigued about the 2-4MB memory. That is more that would typically be available on-chip in a DSP or FPGA. It sounds like an expensive SRAM chip. OTOH a single SDRAM gives 16MB and DDR a lot more - and are a lot cheaper and lower power. Most modern silicon can easily have SDRAM/DDR interfaces. You may want some size reduction to run in 16MB, but it is not as problematic as running in 2MB. With that little memory I wouldn't want to run anything that relied on dynamic memory allocation (after startup) - except for fixed size data buffers. David