32-bit HIGHMEM and game console downstreams

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tue, Sep 16, 2025, at 09:00, Willy Tarreau wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2025 at 08:20:35AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> > The maintainer of that downstream claims to be able to boot modern 
>> > text-mode distros on the GameCube' 24MB, which I find really impressive!
>> 
>> On a simpler musl+busybox userland and even more feature reduced
>> kernel (no network, initramfs-only) I could get to ~10MB, but then it
>> doesn't really do anything besides showing a shell.
>
> When you build your systems from source and install only the necessary
> *files* (not packages) you can get much lower. Here's my reverse-proxy
> for example (aarch64):
>
>   $ df /
>   Filesystem     1K-blocks  Used Available Use% Mounted on
>   /dev/ram0          11520 11520         0 100% /

Yes, that was what I did in my busybox example, which used a tiny
initramfs in the end. Your ramdisk itself is already bigger than
my total 10MB RAM here, but then it also does one thing instead
of nothing.

    Arnd