Posted by tapanjk 2 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_level...
When I was a student mucking around the trashed corner of a retired hardware room, I found a very dusty box that looked promising. It was a Ross hyperstation.
I was able to install Arch Linux and Debian on it. But I think it had some corrupt RAM and would crash after a few days if lucky or hours if not. That was a pity. This was the first system where I could see 4 cpus and had got pretty excited. This was a time when there were rumours of Intel dual cores going around. I was planning to run it as our NFS file server.
I was able to bootstrap GCC on it too, after a few tries.
I changed the battery myself (50€ replacement from Amazon) and it looks as good as new (one benefit of the aluminum chassis and glass display is that they can be cleaned quite well). Hardware support from Linux for those intel machines is great nowadays: WiFi, Bluetooth, trackpad etc all work.
For instance visio calls are unusable on Sequoia (OCLP) but rather smooth on Debian
Would a second-hand 11” MacBook Air or 12” MacBook be a good choice?
Also keep in mind the 11" MacBook air wasn't that small. The Macbook neo with a 13" screen has almost the same dimensions.
For $300-400 you can buy a decent brand new chromebook, and running linux is officially supported on them. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/9145439?hl=en
The chuwi minibook is also an option, but I don't know how well linux is supported.
0, http://www.tinycorelinux.net/
1, https://web.archive.org/web/20240901115514/https://pupngo.dk...
Honestly it comes down to what do you mean by using Linux. In 2026, or well at least since the mid 2010s, the biggest hurdle will be the web browser. Do you need that? If yes then you are already in the higher system requirement pool. If not then pretty much anything goes, like the options I mentioned above. And even then you can use curl, wget, aria2 etc to access online content to some extent
Sure, but in this time and age, do they really have to settle for such extreme 90s looks as defaults? I mean, Windows XP Media Center Edition can surely be considered as "lightweight" today and it featured the gorgeous Royale theme back in 2005.
Windows XP run fine in 256MB ram computers yet it could be altered to make it look fantastic, with the Royale or Royale Noir themes.
I guess even Linux back then could be made beautiful on similarly specced computers. Yet, AntiX or even LxQt is hideous despite consuming more resources!
- i5-6600K (€20 used)
- ASUS STRIX RX 480 8GB (€20 used)
- 16GB DDR4 (€50 used)
€90 all in for an incredible Linux machine that still runs games great at 1080p. Probably even that amount of RAM was overkill, but it's 3200Mhz instead of the old 2133Mhz.
That's 90 for just the upgrade, not the whole PC, and that Rx480 won't run recent AAA games on 1080p, maybe just older games.
The big difference is zswap is dynamically managed by the kernel and zswap sends out compressed pages to swap.
The article says they want to avoid swap hitting disk, so that seems counterproductive.
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.
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.
> 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.