What is the minimum amount of RAM required to run the Linux kernel on an embedded device?

What is the minimum amount of RAM required to run the Linux kernel on an embedded device? On Linux-0.11 for 80x86 minimum RAM required was 2MB to load kernel data structures and interrupt vectors.

How much is the minimum memory required for the current Linux-3.18 kernel? Do different architectures such as x86 and ARM different minimum RAM requirements to boot? How is the same calculated?

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You can reduce it to ~ 600 Kib. Check out the work done by Tom Zanussi from Intel. Tom Presentation and Related Wiki Page .

UPDATE Tom has published interesting statistics on memory usage by various subsystems in the kernel. He was doing research at the time when he was working on the project.

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This site offers:

The minimum configuration of uClinux can be run from 4 MB of RAM, although the recommendation we provide to our customers is that they should design at least 16 MB of RAM.

If you use SDRAM, the problem will be to get a part smaller than 16 MB at a reasonable cost and availability, so maybe this is not a problem? However, for SRAM, this is a large and relatively expensive part.

eLinux.org has a wealth of information on the size of the embedded kernel, how to determine it and how to minimize it.

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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/980987/


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