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

[drago01]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 11:41 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

Yeah but the amount of memory needed for installation is hardly
relevant here .. you install once (with a higher memory allocation)
and scale down afterwards.
And once you have a working image you can reuse it for other installations.

So the VMs are not really much of an issue here.