On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 10:31:38PM -0500, Mason Loring Bliss wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2020 at 02:42:30PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
>
> > Wait a minute. When you say "without GUI", do you mean no X installed,
> > or do you mean it lacks the display manager to boot directly into X?
> > The former precludes desktop use; the latter is how I use my computer
> > every day, because startx and .xinitrc are my friends.
>
> Don't forget xdm, which ends up being what I use. I've never been keen on
> leaving a console sitting there logged in but largely forgotten just for
> startx, as someone could change to it and take advantage of it being
> somewhat vulnerable. But there are practical reasons to consider xdm.
>
> In terms of weight, compare:
>
> $ ps -uq 3944
> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
> root 3944 0.0 0.0 16396 2016 ? Ss Dec09 0:00 /usr/bin/xdm
> $ ps -uq 6181
> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND
> mason 6181 0.0 0.0 7916 4140 pts/9 Ss+ Dec09 0:00 -bash
>
> xdm is taking less than half the resident memory of a bash shell, so if you
> have to pick one of them to sit in the background doing nothing once it's
> facilitated, xdm consumes fewer resources.
>
> Also, for laughs, in Beowulf, the xdm binary consumes 117K on disk, versus
> 1.2M for bash. But this of course doesn't matter much, because deleting
> bash to save space is somewhat unlikely. Following the trail, though, dash
> consumes 119K on disk. Climbing up to the level of usable user shells, mksh
> consumes 275K on disk. (I can't seem to get myself to stick with tcsh long
> enough to call it usable, although I know some folks love it. But for
> completeness: 415K)
And on a PDP-11 with 48K memory, sh ran in less than 48K and left lots
of space over for user programs.
Granted, the sh processes were probably swapped out while the user code
was running.
-- hendrik
>
> --
> Mason Loring Bliss mason@???
> They also surf, who only stand on waves.
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Re: [DNG] What I learned at Distrow…
