svn commit: r46401 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/bsdinstall

[Warner Losh]

> On Apr 1, 2015, at 9:16 AM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 1 Apr 2015, Eitan Adler wrote:
> 
>> Author: eadler
>> Date: Wed Apr  1 05:17:40 2015
>> New Revision: 46401
>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/46401
>> 
>> Log:
>> Minimum Hardware Requirements: installation instructions
>> 
>> reduce the total amount of text and make it more explicit what the minimum and
>> recommend.  Don't include a difference between graphical and non-graphical
>> systems since these days, RAM is cheap.
> 
> Most consumer machines still come with less than 8G, and this can be read as implying that FreeBSD will not run well with less.  That could discourage people from trying FreeBSD.  Even PCBSD recommends a minimum of 4G.
> 
> I suggest:
> 
>  RAM requirements depend on usage.  A minimal FreeBSD system can run in
>  64M, but is limited.  1G or 2G of RAM is adequate for small servers.
>  If ZFS or desktop environments are used, at least 4G is recommended.

Just FYI based on my experience:

32MB possible with extremely tuned system. Lots of effort. Experts only, and even then it is hard.
64MB possible with tuning and turning things off. Fair amount of effort, not so hard, but far from easy.
128MB works reasonably well, some tuning needed. A little bit of effort, but not too hard.
256MB is easy without a GUI, but still too small to rebuild FreeBSD with. Tuning is helpful, but not needed.
512MB with good local disk can rebuild. Takes a while. The absolute minimum for ZFS.
1GB smallest with modern tripped down GUI. ZFS possible with tuning and works well on small data sets
2GB decent performance with modern GUI so long as you don’t over do it. ZFS works w/o tuning, but works better with tuning.
4GB decent performance GUI. ZFS no brainer.

The low end embedded gear still matters for RAM, but with the latest rounds of armv6 hardware it matters less. In the mips (32-bit) space memory still matters a lot, and the above list is partially the result of listening in on people deploying it.

I’d recommend the addition of one sentence:

	Specialized FreeBSD systems can run in as little as 128MB RAM.

which keeps it short enough to make it easy to read, but is specific enough to not shut the door for other deploys that people might be considering. I know that’s 4x bigger than the absolute smallest system, but that’s really about the spot where the current system starts to become hard to push smaller. It will be a good cutoff through 11.x to give system integrators guidance that keeps our options open. The rest looks good as is.

So while RAM is cheap in the desktop and server market, it is still a significant BoM cost in embedded deployments where you ship out hundreds or thousands of boxes.

Warner
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