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Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

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Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#71

Post by initramfs »

alaudet wrote: post #34

You don't even have to go that old. There are so many companies that upgrade tiny pc's its created a whole self hosting community with the tiny lenovo, hp and dell unit's. It's not only Windows that can be replaced with old hardware but also many online services with proxmox for cloud/nas/dns/vpn/multimedia etc. Of course these are not 2GB systems but you can do some pretty cool things with 8 and 9 year old systems t…

I've purchased a few HP and Dell slim desktops (typically 2nd or 3rd generation i3s) on Newegg, from refurbished resellers. During the pandemic, they were $50-70 shipped and included 4GB of RAM. They support PCI-express in low profile, so I could plug in a monitor with 4k output using just displayport and a Radeon 7470 or an R5 R240. You could even get an i5 for not much more. I even had a couple work from home companies offering to ship the same size machine, Nowadays they are more likely to send a laptop and possibly a docking station, so it's a lot more portable (although I prefer to do without those too).

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#72

Post by mgrunwald_ »

For older hardware: Void Linux, Xubuntu or maybe Linux Mint Xfce. If you want something up to date that needs to be online.

AntiX and Puppy Linux are a bit too rough, in my opinion. I'd rather leave the machine with some fully updated old Windows version designed for that hardware, offline. Works very well for retro gaming, ripping CDs and stuff like that.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#73

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

windowsrookie wrote: post #51
pansa2 wrote: post #31

What’s a good small laptop that’ll run a recent Linux distro? I’d like to get one to have an ultra-portable machine for doing lightweight development work - I don’t need much more than a text editor and a C compiler. Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?

They would work but I'm not sure it's worth it. The 11" Air had a pretty terrible screen, and the models with 8GB of RAM are more expensive than I think they are worth. Plus Macbooks of this era are going to need a battery replacement, so your going to have to invest $70-100 on top of the price of buying the Macbook. You're likely going to be $200-300 invested into a 10 year old macbook. Also keep in mind the 11" Mac…

If you want to buy a Chromebook to run non-ChromeOS Linux, I recommend getting something supported by https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/docs/supported-devices.html

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#74

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

cogman10 wrote: post #60

Don't do zram, do zswap. The big difference is zswap is dynamically managed by the kernel and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap.

> and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap.

The article says they want to avoid swap hitting disk, so that seems counterproductive.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#75

Post by cogman10 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #74
cogman10 wrote: post #60

Don't do zram, do zswap. The big difference is zswap is dynamically managed by the kernel and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap.

> and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap. The article says they want to avoid swap hitting disk, so that seems counterproductive.

When you do zram, what happens is the pages sent to zram are compressed. But when those compressed pages need to be evicted to swap, they are decompressed before being sent there. It's not helping you to avoid hitting the disk, it's writing more to the disk.

Zswap will still compress pages in ram. It only evicts to the disk when the in memory swap pool is filled. The difference being that the pages swapped to disk remain compressed on their way there.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#76

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

cogman10 wrote: post #75
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap. The article says they want to avoid swap hitting disk, so that seems counterproductive.

When you do zram, what happens is the pages sent to zram are compressed. But when those compressed pages need to be evicted to swap, they are decompressed before being sent there. It's not helping you to avoid hitting the disk, it's writing more to the disk. Zswap will still compress pages in ram. It only evicts to the disk when the in memory swap pool is filled. The difference being that the pages swapped to disk re…

I think you have it backwards.

When using zram, there is no "evicted to swap"; zram is the swap. Even if you activated zram and disk-backed swap, I'm pretty sure they just get used in parallel, not through some sort of fallback.

It was my understanding that zswap does decompress pages before writing them to disk. Annoyingly, this doesn't seem to be spelled out either way in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/mm/zswap.... ; https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Zswap does say "Once the pool is full or the RAM is exhausted, the least recently used (LRU) page is decompressed and written to disk, as if it had not been intercepted." but doesn't cite that claim.

EDIT: I think my belief is backed by https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v7.1.2/source/mm/zswap.c#L9... -

> We are basically resuming the same swap writeback path that was intercepted with the zswap_store() in the first place. After the folio has been decompressed into the swap cache, the compressed version stored by zswap can be freed.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#77

Post by tocariimaa »

Random09 wrote: post #55

> They are slow because Windows got heavier while the hardware stayed the same. That is not true. They are slow, because ALL software got better and more advanced and that is not only the operating system. It always makes me mad when people say that macOS is so optimized you can do more than on windows. No. Old hardware not having a hardware decoder for modern youtube videos won't play them. Modern webpages full of i…

What about not piping 20MB of JavaScript to the user just to change the color of a button instead?

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#78

Post by hnarn »

zahlman wrote: post #67
initramfs wrote: post #59

Thanks for this link! "antiX is my top pick for truly constrained hardware. It runs on systemd-free Debian Stable, uses around 256MB at idle, and includes a full desktop experience. The trade-off is a less polished interface compared to Ubuntu-based options. If you need something even lighter, Puppy Linux runs entirely in RAM and can resurrect machines that most distros would reject. The learning curve is steeper, bu…

> and it had issues crashing on browsers under even a couple tabs. Surely this has way more to do with the browser (and the website!) than the OS, nowadays.

The memory requirements, yes. The crashing, no. The OS should not crash because memory is running out, but the solution is far from obvious or standardized. My recommendation for RAM constrained systems would be to use zswap combined with a generous amount of swap space.

Re: Linux on Older Hardware: The Complete Revival Guide

#79

Post by cogman10 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #76
cogman10 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you do zram, what happens is the pages sent to zram are compressed. But when those compressed pages need to be evicted to swap, they are decompressed before being sent there. It's not helping you to avoid hitting the disk, it's writing more to the disk. Zswap will still compress pages in ram. It only evicts to the disk when the in memory swap pool is filled. The difference being that the pages swapped to disk re…

I think you have it backwards. When using zram, there is no "evicted to swap"; zram is the swap. Even if you activated zram and disk-backed swap, I'm pretty sure they just get used in parallel, not through some sort of fallback. It was my understanding that zswap does decompress pages before writing them to disk. Annoyingly, this doesn't seem to be spelled out either way in https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admi…

Yup, you are correct about decompressing before hitting disk.

> Even if you activated zram and disk-backed swap, I'm pretty sure they just get used in parallel, not through some sort of fallback.

You can tweak priorities such that zram ends up being the preferred location for swaps.

However, since it looks like just another block device, what happens is it simply gets filled up with the first swap entries and those in turn aren't written out to the disk device.

zswap works better in that way because it'll keep hotter pages in memory and sends LRU pages to the swap device. That's really the biggest reason to use zswap over zram if you are getting into a situation where you overfill your ram.

zram works best if it's the only device with the expectation that you'll OOME when it fills up.

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