Why Fedora needs so much RAM?

[Michael Schwendt]

On 01/06/07, Andreas Bernauer wrote:
> frank wang wrote on Thu, May 31 2007 at 22:14 (-0700):
> > Hi,
> >
> > I tried to run live CD of fedora 7. In the boot up menu, one item is
> > run from RAM. It requires 1GB+ memory. I wondered why fedora 7 takes
> > so much memory. Recently, I am looking for a linux that requires less
> > memory. Supprisingly, Puppy2 and Damn Small Linux can run linux from
> > RAM with 128 MB and 48 MB ram.
>
> As someone else already mentioned on this list, fedora does not "require"
> that much RAM, but uses the RAM that is available to do the best out of
> it, eg. use it as a disk cache (which, btw, is a good thing to do
> when you use fedora from CD).
>
> Isn't it better to use all the available RAM to enhance your user experience
> instead of just letting it lying around unused?
>
> You can check yourself by using the 'free' command and checking the 'cached'
> column.

Comparing the system requirements of the Live (!) CDs with an
installed version of Fedora 7 is like comparing apples with oranges.
It is just the Live-CD "run from RAM" feature that comes with such
enormous memory requirements.