Re: [Devil-linux-develop] systems with low memory

[Heiko Z. <he...@zu...>]

Bruce Smith wrote:

>>I was just thinking if we should modify all the tar commands we use in 
>>DL (save-config, init system) to work better on low memory systems.
>>According to 'man bunzip2' the '-s' parameter should help us, but will 
>>at least take twice as long.
>>
>>Without this modification, DL 1.2 will not run on 32 MB systems.
>>
>>What do you think? I think we should do it.
>>    
>>
>
>Good idea, but I don't think it'll work.  At least not with floppies.
>
>We'd have to remove the "-j" from tar and run bzip2 separately.  
>"-s" means something completely different to the tar command.
>And that will cause problems because a floppy isn't big enough to 
>hold an uncompressed tar config image.
>  
>
tar -c /etc | bzip2 -s -c > etc.tar.bz2
should work, since the uncompressed version of the tar archive gets 
directly piped into bzip2

>If we do it anyway for USB drives. I agree with Diego that we should
>make it an option to run it either way.  Or maybe better yet, if we
>could detect the amount of memory and make it default to the correct
>method without specifying an option.
>  
>
As I wrote before, we could just always use the lowmemory option when we 
detect a system with less then i.e. 40 MB of total RAM.

>What about busybox?  Would it do us any good?  
>Does it have tar and/or bzip2 commands?
>  
>

It does, but I'm not sure about the memory requirements.

Heiko