Russell Coker wrote:
On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, "Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck@gmail.com> wrote:
The smallest I've gotten a rootfs + kernel + ramdisk for minimal Debian, is 49MB, or 23MB with a localyesconfig kernel. And that was using squashfs, so you'd need more RAM to actually run it.
http://etbe.coker.com.au/2008/05/22/xen-and-swap/
In 2008 I found that a default Debian initrd produced on a system with LVM needed 30M of RAM to boot. Getting a virtual machine to boot with 13M of RAM took as much effort as I was prepared to invest in that project.
Note that my numbers above are for the non-volatile storage, i.e. the root filesystem. I was trying to reduce its size because (some of) my PXE clients download their entire OS into RAM at boot, so they don't care if TFTP server dies. A smaller rootfs means it boots faster.