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Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 08:38:02 -0700
From: Victor Yodaiken <yodaiken@fsmlabs.com>
To: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com>,
        Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: mempool design
Message-ID: <20011217083802.A25219@hq2>
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On Mon, Dec 17, 2001 at 04:04:26PM +0100, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> If somebody wants such 1% of ram back he can buy another dimm of ram and
> plug it into his hardware. I mean such 1% of ram lost is something that
> can be solved by throwing a few euros into the hardware (and people buys
> gigabyte boxes anyways so they don't need all of the 100% of ram), the
> other complexy cannot be solved with a few euros, that can only be
> solved with lots braincycles and it would be a maintainance work as
> well. Abstraction and layering definitely helps cutting down the
> complexity of the code.

I agree with all your arguments up to here. But being able to run Linux
in 4Meg or even 8M is important to a very large class of applications. 
Even if you are concerned mostly about bigger systems, making sure NT
remains at a serious disadvantage in the embedded boxes is key because
MS will certainly hope to use control of SOHO routers, set-top boxes
etc to set "standards" that will improve their competitivity in desktop
and beyond. It would be a delicious irony if MS were able to re-use
against Linux the "first control low end" strategy that allowed them 
vaporize the old line UNIXes, but irony is not as satisfying as winning.