Re: bsdinstall: system requirements: memory/RAM: ZFS: 2048 MB for an ordinary installation plus a desktop environment

On Sun, Sep 28, 2025, 4:47 AM Graham Perrin <grahamperrin@gmail.com> wrote:

> Follow-up to <https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=287719#c6>
>
> Good news.
>
> 2048 MB is sufficient with root-on-ZFS for an ordinary installation
> (more than base, less than all of FreeBSD-base) of 15.0-ALPHA4
> plus these five non-base packages, some of which are meta:
>
>      kde plasma6-sddm-kcm sddm virtualbox-guest-additions xorg
>
> Beyond initial installations: with 4 G swap enabled, I repeatedly
> tested forced reinstallation of all packages,
>
>      pkg upgrade -fUy
>
> 1077 packages, 1886 steps. Success.
>
> ----
>
> With swap disabled, which I would not recommend:
>
> - reinstallation failed, switch from ttyv1 to ttyv2 was
>    impossible, and so on, so I attempted a shut down
>    <https://i.imgur.com/RftLGMu.png>
>
> - shut down failed
>
> - following a forced stop of the computer, SDDM and the
>    desktop environment were unsable (pkg issue 2441,
>    second incident this morning).
>

It's big enough to install.. but i have lxte + terminal + firefox with 4
tabs open and I routinely run out of memory and swap heavily. I have a 4GB
Chromebook.

So one can run in 128MB for light tasks and careful kernel tuning, 512MB is
a more realistic minimum since it lets you install and update. But for X
it's flipped: you need 2G to install but closer to 4G or 8G to run a
complete, but on the lean side, X11 system.

Warner

>
>