RE: A reduced Linux network stack for small systems

David Laight
2014-05-06T09:20:47Z

From: Andi Kleen
> There has been a lot of interest recently to run Linux on very small systems,
> like Quark systems. These may have only 2-4MB memory. They are also limited
> by flash space.

I'm intrigued about the 2-4MB memory.
That is more that would typically be available on-chip in a DSP or FPGA.
It sounds like an expensive SRAM chip.
OTOH a single SDRAM gives 16MB and DDR a lot more - and are a lot cheaper
and lower power.
Most modern silicon can easily have SDRAM/DDR interfaces.

You may want some size reduction to run in 16MB, but it is not as problematic
as running in 2MB.

With that little memory I wouldn't want to run anything that relied on
dynamic memory allocation (after startup) - except for fixed size data
buffers.

David