"le9" Strives To Make Linux Very Usable On Systems With Small Amounts Of RAM

[KansaKilla]

ValdikSS and hakavlad—
Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I registered with phoronix just to post this. I am a near total Linux noob who has been trying to resurrect an old ASUS W3J laptop purchased in 2006 that has a 32 bit intel 945PM chipset that limits the addressable ram. Although there are 2 x 2 GB DDR2 ram modules installed, the system can’t fully use all 4 GB. The RV530 mobility X1600 also allocates some of this ram so that the system has something like 2.8 GB total ram. It has a core2duo T7200 64 bit processor and an IDE 320 GB WD hard drive, so no SSD is possible. I’ve been working on trying out various Linux distributions over the last 3 weeks to replace XP, and they all have had major deficiencies. 32 bit distros don’t allow for the use of modern Firefox, and 64 bit distros use most of the ram very quickly, such that multitasking is not really possible. I happened across ValdikSS’s post and tried out the Mint XFCE 20.2 ISO.

Oh my purple penguins! It’s like a whole new computer! I can open multiple tabs in Firefox, run the system monitor, open LibreOffice, and have media playing without the system grinding to a crashing halt! With Firefox, the most tabs I have opened is around 8, but the system is smooooth. It seems to run like it did with XP ages ago. The only issue with the iso from ValdikSS I have is with the suspend not working when I close the lid, but I think it is an XFCE issue, not an issue with the kernel. Still researching that one.

In short, XanMod with the le9 patch has transformed a machine from 2006 that was usable but unsafe with XP into a comfortably usable and safe computing system with Mint XFCE 20.2. I can’t thank you enough for this. Seriously, this has saved me from having to buy a new laptop, and has given me so much joy in being able to use something that would otherwise go into a landfill. It’s a win for me and a win for the environment.

[XRaTiX]

I installed the linux-xanmod-cacule from the AUR and installed in my Manjaro laptop with 8 GB of RAM and 8 GB of ZRAM,I wanted to test how it behave with low memory.

I ran 4

while true; do tail /dev/zero; done

and playing a light game,I noticed the OOM killer come eventually but it freezes a little bit still,like I noticed when it freezes and then the OOM killer come 1-3 seconds later.
Also I ran a node program that consumes 2 GB,open a bunch of apps in my chromium browser and then play GTA 5 (Just to fill out the rest of space),but eventually everything freeze,OOM killer never comes out in time,I need to do ALT + SYSRQ + F to invoke OOM killer and only kills GTA 5 while everything remains intact.

I have clean_min_kbytes 0 and clean_low_kbytes 524288,both defaults to the xanmod kernel and using zram generated with fedora defaults zram-generator configurations

[zram0]
zram-fraction = 1.0
max-zram-size = 8192
compression-algorithm = zstd

I tried ValdikSS Linux Mint ISO in a VM with 2 GB of RAM with a bunch a tabs in the browser,mem-load from nohang-extras and 2 tail /dev/zero and never freezes like my real machine,I see that the clean_min_kbytes and clean_low_kbytes have the sames values as mine.

Do i need to do something else or maybe I doing something wrong? I feel like the le9 patch is not working on my end.

[hakavlad]

Is it safe to switch to XanMod kernel if it shows no problems running the ISO live?

Yes. xanmod kernel uses only soft protection (vm.clean_low_kbytes).

[ValdikSS]

however I still believe that providing an i386.iso (if technically feasible) to try on 32-bit legacy systems (not just on this one) still has some technical and practical merit, especially in the context of free software.

I believe that as well, however many major OS nowadays provide only 64-bit ISOs, and more importantly, XanMod kernel (and other third-party kernels) do not provide 32 bit versions as well, so it won't be a general-purpose secure OS if I provide such ISO unfortunately.
I've contacted XanMod author to package and maintain at least a single 32 bit XanMod kernel branch (xanmod-lts) but got no reply yet.

[ValdikSS]

I tried ValdikSS Linux Mint ISO in a VM with 2 GB of RAM with a bunch a tabs in the browser,mem-load from nohang-extras and 2 tail /dev/zero and never freezes like my real machine,I see that the clean_min_kbytes and clean_low_kbytes have the sames values as mine.

Do i need to do something else or maybe I doing something wrong? I feel like the le9 patch is not working on my end.

You need a userspace oom helper like systemd-oomd or nohang I guess.

[hakavlad]

I've applied the le9db-5.10.patch to my 5.8.18 kernel.
I'm going to run this on Fedora on a 2GB ODroid board.

Did you do it? Did you succeed?