Hey anaconda riders,
I've been trying to figure out the minimum system requirements for Fedora - basic stuff like CPU, memory, storage - and I don't know where to look. As I understand it, anaconda can require more memory than the final running system, so I thought I'd start here ( I did notice this improved a lot with the last release, nice work!)
Anything you can do to answer the question or point me in the right direction, would be a big help. I made a half-hearted effort to find a source for it when preparing the Release Notes for F18, had no success, and so shipped release notes without the information. I'd rather not do that again, and I'm not comfortable coming up with the figures independently.
Thanks, --Pete
On 03/29/2013, Pete Travis wrote:
I've been trying to figure out the minimum system requirements for Fedora - basic stuff like CPU, memory, storage - and I don't know where to look. As I understand it, anaconda can require more memory than the final running system, so I thought I'd start here ( I did notice this improved a lot with the last release, nice work!)
Anything you can do to answer the question or point me in the right direction, would be a big help. I made a half-hearted effort to find a source for it when preparing the Release Notes for F18, had no success, and so shipped release notes without the information. I'd rather not do that again, and I'm not comfortable coming up with the figures independently.
Um, you're being more than a little lazy.
I hold the modern record (Fedora 17 and later) of successful install in 383MB RAM (using the default Anaconda graphical install of the default graphical desktop) on both i686 and x86_64. See my post "successful install using 383MB RAM" to this mailing list on 05/15/2012 and the ensuing thread, and a separate thread of 09/29/2012. On my ancient laptop 383MB is the total RAM, but you can set the limit arbitrarily for any machine by using " mem=NNNm " on the kernel boot command line.
Besides, it isn't that hard to try it yourself. Use a USB2.0 flash memory device, HAVE A SWAP PARTITION, and it will take significantly less than two hours. And if you install from a Fedora Live media "spin" instead of from DVD, then it takes even less time.
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 8:03 PM, John Reiser jreiser@bitwagon.com wrote:
On 03/29/2013, Pete Travis wrote:
I've been trying to figure out the minimum system requirements for Fedora - basic stuff like CPU, memory, storage - and I don't know where to look. As I understand it, anaconda can require more memory than the final running system, so I thought I'd start here ( I did notice this improved a lot with the last release, nice work!)
Anything you can do to answer the question or point me in the right direction, would be a big help. I made a half-hearted effort to find a source for it when preparing the Release Notes for F18, had no success, and so shipped release notes without the information. I'd rather not do that again, and I'm not comfortable coming up with the figures independently.
Um, you're being more than a little lazy.
I hold the modern record (Fedora 17 and later) of successful install in 383MB RAM (using the default Anaconda graphical install of the default graphical desktop) on both i686 and x86_64. See my post "successful install using 383MB RAM" to this mailing list on 05/15/2012 and the ensuing thread, and a separate thread of 09/29/2012. On my ancient laptop 383MB is the total RAM, but you can set the limit arbitrarily for any machine by using " mem=NNNm " on the kernel boot command line.
Besides, it isn't that hard to try it yourself. Use a USB2.0 flash memory device, HAVE A SWAP PARTITION, and it will take significantly less than two hours. And if you install from a Fedora Live media "spin" instead of from DVD, then it takes even less time.
--
Hey John,
If the only way to come up with the official figures is for me to test installations myself, so be it. I have access to enough old hardware to come up with reasonable results, and spinning up kickstarted installations that would iterate through reducing values of "mem=NNNm" would probably give results in short order.
I do recall reading the postings you mention, but I'm reluctant to recommend that kind of deployment to our users. I am making a distinction between minimal and recommended requirements, and while the former would be relatively easy to figure out, the recommended figure is more subjective.
If I have to come up with the numbers myself, I'll probably skip all that and simply recommend, say, a dual core >1GHz CPU with at least 1.5GB of ram and 20GB of available disk space; that seems like a reasonable baseline. I don't want to set an expectation of support without input from the developers of the product that I'm documenting, so I'm writing here for guidance.
--Pete
On Saturday, March 30, 2013, 12:38:21 AM, Pete Travis wrote:
If the only way to come up with the official figures is for me to test installations myself, so be it. I have access to enough old hardware to come up with reasonable results, and spinning up kickstarted installations that would iterate through reducing values of "mem=NNNm" would probably give results in short order.
I do recall reading the postings you mention, but I'm reluctant to recommend that kind of deployment to our users. I am making a distinction between minimal and recommended requirements, and while the former would be relatively easy to figure out, the recommended figure is more subjective.
If I have to come up with the numbers myself, I'll probably skip all that and simply recommend, say, a dual core >1GHz CPU with at least 1.5GB of ram and 20GB of available disk space; that seems like a reasonable baseline. I don't want to set an expectation of support without input from the developers of the product that I'm documenting, so I'm writing here for guidance.
--Pete
I would suggest that the KVM folks would view your suggested baseline with a very real sense of outrage.
As a Fedora user with a mix of older hardware and new, I am uncomfortable with a casual approach to either minimum or recommended resource values.
For real hardware, it is important that Fedora be successfully able to install in older hardware running a previous Fedora release. This ensures that folks are able to continue to run Fedora, but in a secure and supported manner. Overstating the installation requirements tends to discourage folks from upgrading (so they run insecure code), or can force them to move to a different distribution for _NO_GOOD_REASON_. It has the secondary effect that little or no effort is made (at the development or test stages) to ensure that the install runs with minimal resources. Assuming too high a resource requirement becomes a self fulfilling problem.
For virtual machines, there has been much discussion in the main development list over the last year regarding working towards an absolute minimalist installation and runtime requirement. For the case where many virtual instances are required to coexist on the same host, small differences make enormous differences in the final totals.
I would strongly advise against an overly simplistic approach. In the end, it benefits no one. Bring the development community into the discussion, and come up with reasonable classes of systems to be installed and operated as well as realistic final values for each class.
Anaconda development should have the ability (and resources) to perform instrumented installations to measure and really understand what factors contribute to the overall resource requirements. This will help with a goal of reducing (or at absolute minimum stabilizing) these resource requirements.
Al
On Sat, Mar 30, 2013 at 2:46 PM, Al Dunsmuir al.dunsmuir@sympatico.cawrote:
I would suggest that the KVM folks would view your suggested baseline with a very real sense of outrage.
As a Fedora user with a mix of older hardware and new, I am uncomfortable with a casual approach to either minimum or recommended resource values.
For real hardware, it is important that Fedora be successfully able to install in older hardware running a previous Fedora release. This ensures that folks are able to continue to run Fedora, but in a secure and supported manner. Overstating the installation requirements tends to discourage folks from upgrading (so they run insecure code), or can force them to move to a different distribution for _NO_GOOD_REASON_. It has the secondary effect that little or no effort is made (at the development or test stages) to ensure that the install runs with minimal resources. Assuming too high a resource requirement becomes a self fulfilling problem.
For virtual machines, there has been much discussion in the main development list over the last year regarding working towards an absolute minimalist installation and runtime requirement. For the case where many virtual instances are required to coexist on the same host, small differences make enormous differences in the final totals.
I would strongly advise against an overly simplistic approach. In the end, it benefits no one. Bring the development community into the discussion, and come up with reasonable classes of systems to be installed and operated as well as realistic final values for each class.
Anaconda development should have the ability (and resources) to perform instrumented installations to measure and really understand what factors contribute to the overall resource requirements. This will help with a goal of reducing (or at absolute minimum stabilizing) these resource requirements.
Al
You make a good point here, Al. Fedora can be used in a lot of different ways, and a single set of requirements isn't very revealing. The 'recommended' figures I threw out were for the default package set - A Gnome desktop - and I suppose 'minimum' system requirements could be the requirements for @minimum. We can break it down further.
I'll pose the question on the devel list as well, and see what kind of roles the community feels we should represent.
--Pete
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:38:21PM -0600, Pete Travis wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 8:03 PM, John Reiser jreiser@bitwagon.com wrote:
On 03/29/2013, Pete Travis wrote:
I've been trying to figure out the minimum system requirements for Fedora - basic stuff like CPU, memory, storage - and I don't know where to look. As I understand it, anaconda can require more memory than the final running system, so I thought I'd start here ( I did notice this improved a lot with the last release, nice work!)
Anything you can do to answer the question or point me in the right direction, would be a big help. I made a half-hearted effort to find a source for it when preparing the Release Notes for F18, had no success, and so shipped release notes without the information. I'd rather not do that again, and I'm not comfortable coming up with the figures independently.
Um, you're being more than a little lazy.
I hold the modern record (Fedora 17 and later) of successful install in 383MB RAM (using the default Anaconda graphical install of the default graphical desktop) on both i686 and x86_64. See my post "successful install using 383MB RAM" to this mailing list on 05/15/2012 and the ensuing thread, and a separate thread of 09/29/2012. On my ancient laptop 383MB is the total RAM, but you can set the limit arbitrarily for any machine by using " mem=NNNm " on the kernel boot command line.
Besides, it isn't that hard to try it yourself. Use a USB2.0 flash memory device, HAVE A SWAP PARTITION, and it will take significantly less than two hours. And if you install from a Fedora Live media "spin" instead of from DVD, then it takes even less time.
--
Hey John,
If the only way to come up with the official figures is for me to test installations myself, so be it. I have access to enough old hardware to come up with reasonable results, and spinning up kickstarted installations that would iterate through reducing values of "mem=NNNm" would probably give results in short order.
I do recall reading the postings you mention, but I'm reluctant to recommend that kind of deployment to our users. I am making a distinction between minimal and recommended requirements, and while the former would be relatively easy to figure out, the recommended figure is more subjective.
If I have to come up with the numbers myself, I'll probably skip all that and simply recommend, say, a dual core >1GHz CPU with at least 1.5GB of ram and 20GB of available disk space; that seems like a reasonable baseline. I don't want to set an expectation of support without input from the developers of the product that I'm documenting, so I'm writing here for guidance.
--Pete
There really should be no expectation of official support for Fedora. While anyone is free to file bugs and updates are released, there is no SLA for Fedora.
You get out of Fedora what you put in to it.
Regarding hardware requirements, since installation is I/O bound, more RAM is better. If the kernel fails to boot on your system, consider your CPU unsupported. The release notes (docs.fedoraproject.org) list minimum RAM requirements for installation. These numbers are the outcome of periodic tests to determine what actually works in most use cases.
For me personally, I would not want to have less than 2G of RAM in a system that I plan on using.
On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 7:09 AM, David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com wrote:
There really should be no expectation of official support for Fedora. While anyone is free to file bugs and updates are released, there is no SLA for Fedora.
You get out of Fedora what you put in to it.
Regarding hardware requirements, since installation is I/O bound, more RAM is better. If the kernel fails to boot on your system, consider your CPU unsupported. The release notes (docs.fedoraproject.org) list minimum RAM requirements for installation. These numbers are the outcome of periodic tests to determine what actually works in most use cases.
For me personally, I would not want to have less than 2G of RAM in a system that I plan on using.
-- David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com Manager, Installer Engineering Team Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDT
Hey David,
I'm the current Docs Project team lead, and I'm gathering information to put into the Release Notes.
The only support I would lead users to expect is that the system functions as documented. I'll pose the question on the fedora devel mailing list, and probably the QA list as well. I would like input from you and the anaconda team as well. Any guidance you can provide towards accurate documentation would be appreciated.
--Pete
On Mon, Apr 01, 2013 at 08:28:30AM -0600, Pete Travis wrote:
On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 7:09 AM, David Cantrell <[1]dcantrell@redhat.com> wrote:
There really should be no expectation of official support for Fedora. While
anyone is free to file bugs and updates are released, there is no SLA for Fedora. You get out of Fedora what you put in to it. Regarding hardware requirements, since installation is I/O bound, more RAM is better. If the kernel fails to boot on your system, consider your CPU unsupported. The release notes ([2]docs.fedoraproject.org) list minimum RAM requirements for installation. These numbers are the outcome of periodic tests to determine what actually works in most use cases. For me personally, I would not want to have less than 2G of RAM in a system that I plan on using. -- David Cantrell <[3]dcantrell@redhat.com> Manager, Installer Engineering Team Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDTHey David, I'm the current Docs Project team lead, and I'm gathering information to put into the Release Notes. The only support I would lead users to expect is that the system functions as documented. I'll pose the question on the fedora devel mailing list, and probably the QA list as well. I would like input from you and the anaconda team as well. Any guidance you can provide towards accurate documentation would be appreciated. --Pete
Ah, I was confused. Nothing stood out in the email that you were the docs lead...at least my first pass of it. I assume messages like that are support questions, which show up from time to time on the list. Apologies.
If you subscribe to this list, you can see our discussions regarding the minimum RAM requirement. That's really our main focus, ensuring we set that to a realistic number. For other hardware requirements, I'd ask the kernel guys and the X developers.
One thing that frequently comes up is the question about why the installation requires more memory than the installed system. An end user using something other than GNOME or KDE will likely have a smaller runtime requirement. I've always tried to explain that the installation environment does not necessarily represent the final environment you will have installed. Our installation environment is developed to make use of software that exists in a default install, not the smallest system you could possibly install. Not sure if there's a good way to mention that in the documentation.
What I really want to say is that the XFCE user, LXDE user, Window Maker user, blackbox user, and so on are all edge cases, not a base case.
I am running Fedora 18 on a netbook with a dual core atom processor. There is 1 gig of ram. 256gig of hard disk, and with this netbook, I do browsing, emails, and compiling programs in c and c++.
I use gnome, but lately switched to xfce as xfce gives me about 50 megs free of ram. That makes a bit of a difference. On my real desktop, I have 3.5gigs, and Fedora flies. That desktop is an older Intel dual core i945gnt system. Today you can buy that for $100-$200
Regards Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better.mailto:lsatenstein@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenstein@gmail.com SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE LINUX SYSTEM.
--- On Mon, 4/1/13, Pete Travis lists@petetravis.com wrote:
From: Pete Travis lists@petetravis.com Subject: Re: Minimum and recommended system requirements for Fedora To: "Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer" anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com Date: Monday, April 1, 2013, 10:28 AM
On Mon, Apr 1, 2013 at 7:09 AM, David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com wrote:
There really should be no expectation of official support for Fedora. While
anyone is free to file bugs and updates are released, there is no SLA for
Fedora.
You get out of Fedora what you put in to it.
Regarding hardware requirements, since installation is I/O bound, more RAM
is better. If the kernel fails to boot on your system, consider your CPU
unsupported. The release notes (docs.fedoraproject.org) list minimum RAM
requirements for installation. These numbers are the outcome of periodic
tests to determine what actually works in most use cases.
For me personally, I would not want to have less than 2G of RAM in a system
that I plan on using.
--
David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com
Manager, Installer Engineering Team
Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDT
Hey David, I'm the current Docs Project team lead, and I'm gathering information to put into the Release Notes.
The only support I would lead users to expect is that the system functions as documented. I'll pose the question on the fedora devel mailing list, and probably the QA list as well. I would like input from you and the anaconda team as well. Any guidance you can provide towards accurate documentation would be appreciated.
--Pete
-----Inline Attachment Follows-----
_______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
Are the release notes for F18 or F19? With every release, Fedora is getting fatter and fatter, and some what slower than earlier versions.
Regards Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better.mailto:lsatenstein@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenstein@gmail.com SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE LINUX SYSTEM.
--- On Mon, 4/1/13, David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com wrote:
From: David Cantrell dcantrell@redhat.com Subject: Re: Minimum and recommended system requirements for Fedora To: "Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer" anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com Date: Monday, April 1, 2013, 9:09 AM
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 10:38:21PM -0600, Pete Travis wrote:
On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 8:03 PM, John Reiser jreiser@bitwagon.com wrote:
On 03/29/2013, Pete Travis wrote:
I've been trying to figure out the minimum system requirements for Fedora - basic stuff like CPU, memory, storage - and I don't know where to look. As I understand it, anaconda can require more memory than the final running system, so I thought I'd start here ( I did notice this improved a lot with the last release, nice work!)
Anything you can do to answer the question or point me in the right direction, would be a big help. I made a half-hearted effort to find a source for it when preparing the Release Notes for F18, had no success, and so shipped release notes without the information. I'd rather not do that again, and I'm not comfortable coming up with the figures independently.
Um, you're being more than a little lazy.
I hold the modern record (Fedora 17 and later) of successful install in 383MB RAM (using the default Anaconda graphical install of the default graphical desktop) on both i686 and x86_64. See my post "successful install using 383MB RAM" to this mailing list on 05/15/2012 and the ensuing thread, and a separate thread of 09/29/2012. On my ancient laptop 383MB is the total RAM, but you can set the limit arbitrarily for any machine by using " mem=NNNm " on the kernel boot command line.
Besides, it isn't that hard to try it yourself. Use a USB2.0 flash memory device, HAVE A SWAP PARTITION, and it will take significantly less than two hours. And if you install from a Fedora Live media "spin" instead of from DVD, then it takes even less time.
--
Hey John,
If the only way to come up with the official figures is for me to test installations myself, so be it. I have access to enough old hardware to come up with reasonable results, and spinning up kickstarted installations that would iterate through reducing values of "mem=NNNm" would probably give results in short order.
I do recall reading the postings you mention, but I'm reluctant to recommend that kind of deployment to our users. I am making a distinction between minimal and recommended requirements, and while the former would be relatively easy to figure out, the recommended figure is more subjective.
If I have to come up with the numbers myself, I'll probably skip all that and simply recommend, say, a dual core >1GHz CPU with at least 1.5GB of ram and 20GB of available disk space; that seems like a reasonable baseline. I don't want to set an expectation of support without input from the developers of the product that I'm documenting, so I'm writing here for guidance.
--Pete
There really should be no expectation of official support for Fedora. While anyone is free to file bugs and updates are released, there is no SLA for Fedora.
You get out of Fedora what you put in to it.
Regarding hardware requirements, since installation is I/O bound, more RAM is better. If the kernel fails to boot on your system, consider your CPU unsupported. The release notes (docs.fedoraproject.org) list minimum RAM requirements for installation. These numbers are the outcome of periodic tests to determine what actually works in most use cases.
For me personally, I would not want to have less than 2G of RAM in a system that I plan on using.
On Apr 1, 2013 12:22 PM, "Leslie S Satenstein" lsatenstein@yahoo.com wrote:
Are the release notes for F18 or F19? With every release, Fedora is
getting fatter and fatter, and some what slower than earlier versions.
Regards
Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better. mailto:lsatenstein@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenstein@gmail.com SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE LINUX SYSTEM.
Hey Leslie,
We're currently working on Release Notes for the upcoming Fedora 19 release.
I'll be starting a thread on the Fedora development mailing list later today, when I can get back to my desk. Can I suggest continuing there? I don't want to impose on the anaconda team's list.
--Pete
anaconda-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
-
Al Dunsmuir -
David Cantrell -
John Reiser -
Leslie S Satenstein -
Pete Travis