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Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

(www.tinycorelinux.net)
518 points LorenDB | 9 comments | 06 Dec 25 14:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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trollbridge ◴[06 Dec 25 15:15 UTC] No.46173936[source]▶
Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk.

Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

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maccard ◴[06 Dec 25 15:26 UTC] No.46174032[source]▶
A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.
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echoangle ◴[06 Dec 25 15:40 UTC] No.46174159[source]▶
Do you really need the framebuffer in RAM? Wouldn't that be entirely in the GPU RAM?
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1. jerrythegerbil ◴[06 Dec 25 15:51 UTC] No.46174232[source]▶
To put it in GPU RAM, you need GPU drivers.

For example, NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G.

That math actually goes wildly in the opposite direction for an optimization argument.

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2. Rohansi ◴[06 Dec 25 16:01 UTC] No.46174310[source]▶
> NVIDIA GPU drivers are typically around 800M-1.5G.

They also pack in a lot of game-specific optimizations for whatever reason. Could likely be a lot smaller without those.

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3. monocasa ◴[06 Dec 25 16:10 UTC] No.46174400[source]▶
Even the open source drivers without those hacks are massive. Each type of card has its own almost 100MB of firmware that runs on the card on Nvidia.
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4. jsheard ◴[06 Dec 25 16:17 UTC] No.46174452[source]▶
Doesn't the UEFI firmware map a GPU framebuffer into the main address space "for free" so you can easily poke raw pixels over the bus? Then again the UEFI FB is only single-buffered, so if you rely on that in lieu of full-fat GPU drivers then you'd probably want to layer some CPU framebuffers on top anyway.
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5. the8472 ◴[06 Dec 25 16:48 UTC] No.46174701[source]▶
well, if you poke framebuffer pixels directly you might as well do scanline racing.
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6. throwaway173738 ◴[06 Dec 25 17:01 UTC] No.46174783[source]▶
Yes if you have UEFI.
7. jsheard ◴[06 Dec 25 17:04 UTC] No.46174815{3}[source]▶
Alas, I don't think UEFI exposes vblank/hblank interrupts so you'd just have to YOLO the timing.
8. jsheard ◴[06 Dec 25 17:15 UTC] No.46174904{3}[source]▶
That's 100MB of RISC-V code, believe it or not, despite Nvidias ARM fixation.
9. hinkley ◴[06 Dec 25 19:36 UTC] No.46175997[source]▶
Someone last winter was asking for help with large docker images and it came about that it was for AI pipelines. The vast majority of the image was Nvidia binaries. That was wild. Horrifying, really. WTF is going on over there?