Redox 0.3.3 released

7 Comments

1. 2017-09-20 1:50 pm

   yoshi314@gmail.com

   a compressed system image <80mb that used to take up >1GB of ram ?

   did they assign some special ramdisk in memory, or was the code that bloated?

   Edited 2017-09-20 13:50 UTC
• 2017-09-20 2:16 pm

  avgalen

  There isn’t really a relationship between how much storage a system or code uses and how much RAM it needs. With a few lines of code you can create a program of a few KB that can require hundreds of MB’s of RAM for good reasons.

  Here is a great example of that:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
• 2017-09-20 3:54 pm

  yoshi314@gmail.com

  i am familiar with procedural generation, but not in the operating system.

  i am guessing the ramdisk size is overestimated.
• 2017-09-20 7:46 pm

  FlyingJester

  It’s trivially easy to create an OS (or any other executable, since that’s all an OS is) that is incredibly small in size but takes arbitrary amounts of RAM when loaded. See the .bss segment as the most obvious example.
• 2017-09-20 9:23 pm

  avgalen

  i am familiar with procedural generation, but not in the operating system.

  i am guessing the ramdisk size is overestimated.

  Maybe you took my example too literally since you mentioned procedural generation. My point was that a very small program can require lots of memory to run properly.

  Let’s give a more common example: Browsers are about 100 MB in size, but you wouldn’t run them on a machine with only 100 MB of RAM.

  The inverse can also be true. Modern IDE’s or database systems can require many Gigabytes of diskspace, but as long as you don’t call most of the included libraries you might only need a few 100 MB’s of RAM to run these programs. Same for games that only load a very specific part of their dozens of GB’s of storage at any give time.

  My point was simply that there is no relationship between code-size, required diskspace and RAM-requirements
• 2017-09-21 4:58 pm

  zima

  Let’s give a more common example: Browsers are about 100 MB in size, but you wouldn’t run them on a machine with only 100 MB of RAM.

  Ah, where are the days of classic Opera 9.27… (the high mark for Opera IMHO; I still keep a copy on my old dual Pentium2 machine with 192 MiB of RAM, and it’s quite usable; not 100, but in the same league I guess…)
2. 2017-09-23 5:45 pm

   Giorgos

   From the documentation: “Currently, Redox only natively supports booting from a hard disk with no partition table”.

   Unfortunately, it’s difficult to test it, on real hardware.