Crazy but stable. hrev58228 works with 128MB

crazy but stable. haiku work with 256M

memory 256M

CPU single atom 1.92Ghz

disk 5Gb

it can work!

9 Likes

Oh, wow. Thatā€™s half the RAM my netbook has, and well below minimum requirements even for the 32-bit edition. Haiku amazes again!

1 Like

Waddlesplash did several optimizations, but no one has yet re-tested how low we can set the requirement and still have Haiku booting. We should do that some time before the beta 6 release, I guess.

1 Like

I thought @jscipione did and lowered the requirements?

I am suprised they are not lowered.

It looks like the wiki page with the release notes: R1/Beta5/ReleaseNotes ā€“ Haiku

was not used to write the release notes: R1/beta5 ā€“ Release Notes | Haiku Project

I love to see this happen in a world where even Linux is increasingly bloated. Only NetBSD still cares about performance the way Haiku does.

Thatā€™s not much performance reallyā€¦ Haiku is incredibly un-performant compared to linux. We care about other stuff first, like responsiveness in the UI.

1 Like

I updated the release notes on the beta5 wiki page from the information in the monthly status reports to try and summarize the changes since beta4 leading up to release. While doing this, I lowered the minimum requirements to 256MB since I have observed Haiku booting with 256MB. It does seem to be a fairly recent change because Haiku would NOT boot with 256MB previously, in B4 and even after. I know this primarily because VMWare creates new VMs of the Other type configured with 256MB by default and then tries to boot them right away. It used to hang on the memory icon never getting to the Desktop, but something got updated to make it boot all the way to the Desktop.

Waddlesplash did his own thing for the release notes and that detail got missed. Weā€™ll keep it our little secret that 256MB boots, although the secret is apparently out!

it should be 1G Disk , 256M Memory , single atom 1.92Ghz cpu.

*haiku work well.

even better than Q4OS-tde with the the same qemu-computer which system special focus at old time.

2 Likes

We Linux users begged for decades to have an OS that prioritizes, you know, user interface responsiveness. I donā€™t care if Linux can eke out more performance out of an i9 with 64GB of RAM. Iā€™ll be an old man before any computer I own will be that powerful. I can think of maybe two Linux distributions that still run at all on the kind of machine where Haiku feels right at home. So thank you for caring and doing the right thing.

2 Likes

And I thought my Haiku 32-bit machine (with 2-threaded 1.6 Ghz Atom CPU and 1 Gb of RAM) is impressiveā€¦ Now I see Haiku even works with 4 times less memory. :+1:

AntiX, Slackware and Void GNU/Linux (in that order) can actually run well on old machines with 1 Gb of RAM or even less, but I never dared trying with less than 512 Mb. Besides, 256 Mb is barely higher than what a Spartan graphical setup needs (OpenBox window manager, without any bells and whistles running in the background). Even such a poor manā€™s ā€œdesktopā€ will take over ~200 Mb just to start. There are other ā€œnicheā€ distributions specifically designed for low-end old computers, but all of them have restrictions, and you will need to sacrifice functionality.

There are other problems with GNU/Linux on old machines - and Iā€™m not talking about the fact many distributions dropped 32-bit support. glibc (which is what is used in most distributions) is incompatible with some of those oldies, starting from glibc 2.36. And even if your machine is compatible, elogind (which is widely adopted nowadays, even on distributions that donā€™t use systemd) is causing a variety of problems. The most pronounced of those is the system goes on hibernate mode every few seconds by itself.
There are workarounds for those issues, but I would say Haiku is a much better solution. And considering FreeBSD announced the end of 32-bit support in the next major release, if you want to keep an old machine alive, there arenā€™t much other choices left.

letā€™s rock and roll.

CPU signal ATOM 1.92hz

memory ļ¼ˆ128+64+32+16+8ļ¼‰=248M

disk ļ¼ˆ1024*8/10ļ¼‰=819.2M

and, haiku run!!!

3 Likes

AntiX 23 running in 32 bits uses 70MB of RAM on a fresh start, so a VM with 512MB is plentiful. Void might still boot, but the installer runs out of RAM, so no, not anymore. Alpine probably works, and from the other camp thereā€™s always NetBSD. Havenā€™t tried any of these on bare metal though.

So yes, props for Haiku, which just received a lot more features yet its hardware requirements got cut in half. Funny how that works.

OK, it seems, only puppy , tinycore and haiku can work with 256M Memory.
puppy , it can not run any application with the hard situation.
haiku can run 3 or 4 applications.
tinycore can run more applications.

haiku is good enough for hard situation.

5 Likes

When running with less than 1GB of RAM, itā€™s probably best to use the 32-bit build of Haiku, as the savings you get from the system using 32-bit pointers instead of 64-bit pointers (among other things) can wind up being significant.

Anyway, Iā€™ve pushed some more memory usage optimizations for packagefs and a pretty major memory leak fix for the BIOS bootloader (and a smaller one for the EFI loader), so it would be interesting to see this retested. Iā€™d imagine that the system can now boot once more with 128MB (or at least the 32-bit version should come close, as long as you donā€™t have too many packages installed.)

12 Likes

QEMU machine
disk : 1024 M
CPU: signal 2.4Ghz

1ļ¼Œwhen memory >= 153 M
haiku can finish the progress of logo stage怂
but it can not get into desktop environment怂

2ļ¼Œ when memory >= 175 M
haiku can get into desktop environment怂
but it can not run webpositive怂

3ļ¼Œwhen memory = 192 M
Haiku can run webpositive怂
but, it hard to display image online怂

2 Likes

What hrev is this? The major bootloader memory leak fix was in hrev58211, so if this is before that (looks like the last nightly build precedes that, I guess the CI is offline again), then Iā€™m not surprised that it still needs 192+ MB.

EDIT: Ah, I see itā€™s hrev58204. Well, once hrev58211 is available, testing with that will be more interesting.

7 posts were split to a new topic: Haiku on 486?

So 32-bit Haiku isnā€™t going to get phased out like Linux distros are doing, right?

No,Haiku 32bit is here to stay,at least for the foreseeable future.
It is the only edition that has ABI compatibility for old BeOS application.
And since Haiku also targets giving new life to older computers,it wouldnā€™t make sense to drop it at all.

1 Like