Graphics driver support in F21+

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2013-08-28 at 10:41 -0400, Solomon Peachy wrote:

> Ditto on the embedded graphics (eg SiS or i810 etc) -- many of those 
> platforms had serious RAM limitations too.  I have a pile of old P4+i845 
> boxes stacked in a corner that max out at 512MB (due to chipset 
> limitations) which isn't even enough RAM to boot the Fedora installer in 
> text mode.

This isn't actually correct; the release notes are a tad conservative
(intentionally). There are actually some quite subtle variables for
minimal RAM situations - including RAM sharing with graphics adapters,
package set selection, and available swap space - so this isn't 100%
applicable to all situations, but the testing we did on F19 indicated
that you can do successfully complete a graphical DVD default package
install with 512MB of RAM, or a text network default package install. I
believe a text install may even work in 384MB, though I don't absolutely
remember, and you may have to pass the parameter that disable's
anaconda's RAM check to try it. Graphical network installs require more
than 512MB - network installs need extra RAM before swap space comes
online, as they go out and get package lists. Actually you could
probably do an ugly hack around that by passing an intentionally invalid
repo=, going through the storage spoke, and *then* setting the correct
repo interactively, but that'd be hideous.

It _is_ possible to deploy Fedora in ways that bypass the installer, as
well, and the memory required to actually run a Fedora system that does
useful things is well south of 512MB. Even for desktop purposes you can
still do useful stuff using a light WM or DE in 256MB, and one of my
server VMs (which runs IRC and IM proxying and my XMPP server) sits at
under 100MB of RAM use, IIRC. A minimal Fedora install sitting there
doing nothing uses about 60-80MB of RAM, last I checked.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin DOT net
http://www.happyassassin.net