Early versions of BeOS (DR5-6) consumed 4,5 Mb of RAM (“The developer releases of BeOS occupied 4.5MB of memory. From release to release the kernel size varies from 200 to 300 kb. Currently I think mine is 257 kb. The cumulated size of the different binaries for the system (including the browser) is in the 2 megs. The remaining 2-3 megs seem to be for resource tracking, database support and various system tables.”). Be Engineers and early 3rd party developers used 8 Mb in their BeBoxes. Still, Be recommended to install 16 Mb of RAM in BeBox.
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It’s kinda funny: Back in the BeOS days, we were concerning ourselves how to make machines working that had ‘too much’ RAM. Now people make a point of using the least amount of RAM possible… 
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I tried the same nightly in CD mode with qemu -cdrom haiku-master-hrev54185-x86_64-anyboot.iso -m 256M and it locked up at the blue screen. It needs more RAM when booting off CD as it uses overlay filesystems (attribute_overlay, log_overlay, write_overlay). Bumping RAM to 266M made it boot to the FirstBootPrompt from where I could start the Installer.
Beta2 will likely need even more RAM as there are extra packages installed by default (so packagefs will require more RAM) Still it’s much more than what Windows XP needed.
Update: 7 minutes later with 256M in CD mode it actually managed to start FirstBootPrompt and the Installer, however it was extremely slow at doing it. I’m not sure 256M will be enough for Installer to complete the installation.
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I managed to run BeOS on this, but it was slow. Compiling simple project take more than minute. Also I can’t get color display output. I still have this PC and can try again if needed.
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I tried to boot this PC, but 1GB HDD won’t start. It repeatedly produce sound and then stop. Newer 120GB HDD makes BIOS to freeze. HDD interface is mini-IDE.
I managed to run BeOS on SHARP PC-A365 (120 MHz CPU, 16 MB RAM) by using 120 GB HDD, native 1 GB HDD seems dead:
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Wow, that’s pretty cool. Would be great to cut down memory usage in Haiku to not need 266 MB to start.
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It almost looks like there is a bug in memory handling as with 1GB RAM AboutSystem shows right after a fresh boot that only 190MB RAM is used and some more is used by cache. So it seems that the cache is never released since it can’t start AboutSystem with 256M RAM.
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High memory usage is seems to be caused by packagefs.
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I think the RAM usage report can be a bit confusing in this case, because there are multiple levels of cache (file and block cache) and one of them (don’t remember which) is not reported because it is designed to just use all the free RAM. So if we added it to these numbers, your RAM usage would be 100% all the time, which is technically true, but also not really helpful. Packagefs relies a lot on the caches (it stores uncompressed data there) and shows the limitation of the design. There is an “unify filesystem caches” ticket. There was a GSoC idea about it but now no one in the team knows the design of the caches well enough to mentor it. It would probably help with this and be an opportunity to reconsider other things in the cache design.
Ticket number? Search “unify filesystem caches” give 0 results.
The cache unification would be good for performance, but is unnecessary for solving the memory usage problems @X512 is talking about. Both the file cache and the block cache watch the “low resource handler” and should evict pages or blocks from the cache when the system is low on memory.
Packagefs’ internal cache, on the other hand, may not; I don’t know. This is worth looking into.
I also remember that Haiku memory usage was significantly increased when Unicode ICU libraries were introduced.
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The library is big but it’s mostly data and shared between apps. So, yes, you have this several megabytes lib loaded in RAM. We do need most of that data, but we could investigate configuring ICU differently to load it more on-demand maybe.
I have a system that Haiku consumes nearly 1000MB upon startup on a fresh install. But it has 32GB. That’s expected and a non-issue. So keep in mind that memory usage is somewhat tied to memory capacity.
Those were the good days. 
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This looks strange. What can consume 1GB on start? Page table?
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From previous tests:
- 256MB RAM minimum to boot.
- Installer works with 384 -> 512 MB RAM.
- 288 MB RAM usage after boot (hrev54215 x86).
Power user: 64GB-128GB RAM support ?
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