Why have the minimum system requirements for Haiku R1/beta3 been increased? Haiku R1/beta2 required a minimum of 256 MB of RAM. In R1/beta3, this is already 384 MB of RAM. What increased the system requirements and could it have been avoided?
It is 2021. Just give Haiku 16+ GB RAM, you wont be dissapointed.
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that’s right. Although if the system eats little memory, it works better…
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QaweEmm is right. Just because main RAM is cheap doesn’t mean the CPU cache is growable.
Some of the increase in memory is due to the package management, although IMHO it’s justified since it brings more benefits than detriments.
That being said, the minimum requirements do need an update. 512 MB as min. RAM required seems reasonable. Are there bare-metal systems out there that have more than 384 MB RAM but less than 512 MB RAM?
IDK, seems a bit much to tell users to just throw 16+ GB RAM at Haiku. It works well enough in systems with much lower RAM available. Lowest end machine that I have haiku on has 2 GB RAM and it usually performs as well as another computer with 8 GB RAM.
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Okay, I’ll know… Although the system is developing, and, nevertheless, it is very cool that it has such small system requirements
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My 2 GB system works fine… On this 4GB machine with many apps installed, it consumes around 400 MB (and some pocket change) RAM on boot. The modern RAM headroom is however great for web browsing and other “rich content” activities. If Haiku is expected to function as a desktop system in the modern world, expecting users to to have at least a couple of GB RAM is reasonable (but for more basic things, it is GREAT that it is a relative RAM meiser)
Yes, exactly. This is why we have minimum sys requiments.
Now we have minimum sys reqs, your middle field, and my recommended reqs. I see no problems with that.
We keep adding features and as of now, optimization is not one of the high priority goals for the Haiku development team. Our memory requirements are determined by running Haiku in a virtual machine with various memory sizes and checking if it will install correctly or not. We only check in 128MB increments so the sudden jump seems big. But maybe it would work with 257 or 259MB of RAM. No one bothered to check that. So, it’s 384 now (256+128).
If someone wants to put in the work to save a few megabytes, that’s great and we’ll probably accept the patches (if there isn’t a compromise like making everything slower to save RAM). But at the moment we have more important things to work on, especially as 384MB is just ridiculously low compared to most other OS out there, and compared to available hardware.
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Okay, thanks
Is there a way to unplug some of the (unused) features easily to save on RAM?
If yes which would be obvious ways to do that?
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