Fedora 18 Beta to slip by two weeks, Beta release date is now Nov 27

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 09:30:14AM -0500, David Cantrell wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 09, 2012 at 11:21:07AM +0100, Matej Cepl wrote:
> > On 2012-11-09, 07:43 GMT, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > > It hasn't really 'skyrocketed'. We cited 512MB for several releases,
> > > bumped it to 768MB for F15/F16 (IIRC), got it back down to 512MB for
> > > F17, and it's back up to 768MB or 1GB for F18 atm because everyone has
> > > more important stuff to do than optimize the RAM usage right now. But
> > > it's not been rising crazily or anything. I think the last time someone
> > > took a deep look at RAM use during install - during F17 cycle when we
> > > got it back down to 512MB - it turned out a lot of the usage happened
> > > during package install and wasn't really to do with anaconda at all.
> > 
> > I understand and accept that now everybody in the anaconda-land is busy 
> > with something else, but let it not slip our attention how absolutely 
> > crazy it is when the installation program requires twice as much (or 
> > more) of the resources than all programs running on the computer 
> > combined. I have here a server with RHEL-6 which I had to upgrade to 
> > 512MB just to be able to install a system on it. Now it has plenty of 
> > free RAM even with some bulky PHP apps (e.g., Zarafa) which is wasted.  
> > With the spread of virtual machines, it seems to be even more obvious.  
> > Wasn’t one of the advantages of VMs the fact that you can slice more 
> > small machines on one computer?
> 
> Yes, that is an advantage, but that shouldn't be slicing up one computer in
> to multiple very underpowered smaller computers.
> 
> Just to cite similar complaints I see from time to time...  It irritates me
> that people think it's a problem that in 2012 they can't install in a VM
> that is allocated with 256M of RAM.  Allocate a reasonable amount, start
> over.  Your host system for multiple VMs in 2012 should not have 1G of
> memory.

You're very wrong here.  Memory is *the* key limiting resource for
VMs, particularly when people want to pack as many VMs into a system
as possible.  If the minimum required for an OS goes from 256 -> 512MB,
then the number of VMs that can be run per host (more than) halves.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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