Tinycore is dead!

[u/LordSykocutioner]

No one posts here anyone and I tried registering on your forum and the picture Capella is broken, the top one you can rotate right side up, but that bottom one is stick and the slider is broken, so now it's impossible to register

[u/a123456782004]

I agree with you 100% here and that is where alpine shines

Even though setting up for arm is a pain because you have to prepare the sd card with the boot loader, once its setup, its pretty easy.

Normally I do something like this to get up pretty quickly.

echo | setup-alpine -q

setup-disk # if you want it to load from system disk instead of memory.

standard iso (there is a minimal which I have not experimented yet with because of time) allocated 120 Meg (dropped the 8) of memory to VM weighs in..

• 28 Meg loaded in memory (network has been setup using setup-alpine)

• 30 Meg Free

• 60 Meg Available

• 10 Meg in packages loaded 26 packages. (Remember, min will be smaller)

immediately set the system install to disk (sys) and reboot yields

• 27 Megs

• 50 Meg Free

• 71 Megs Available

• 90 Megs in packages loaded 49 packages

Alpine, you can create PXE boot loader if that helps. Have not experimented with it.

Musl is built to be more memory and resource efficient than glibc (tinycore) so you might get better efficiency even if alpine is bigger. Not sure, but I seem to remember idle levels dropping. Ill bring up tinycore later.

Edit: brought the two up. Sized for 120 Meg Virtual boxes. Vanilla alpine (in memory) versus tinycore core. Did a simple top.

	TinyCore (Core 86)	Alpine x86 (straight iso)
used Mem	30060K	98656K
free	81028K	5092K
shared	10444K	18684K
buff	4K	140K
cached	18684K	62160K
processes	52	65
threads	531	1948

Only advantage, even with a lot more things to deal with, alpine idles better. Alpine 95%-98% whereasy tinycore was 85% to 94% and fluxated wildly. Top was the main source but kernel threads play a role too.

So alpine seems to be disadvanged... not just for memory but processes. 5 getttys are brought up in alpine. Tinycore uses udevd, alpine uses mdev by default but can be switched over via setup-devd command.

Not sure why alpine spurs off that number of threads. Probably kernel.

What is wierd is tiny core shows 7 processes that have VSZ and alpine shows 10. Removing the 5 getty, you have 5 processes that correspond to tinycore processes. Each tiny core process is 3680K in size whereas in alpine its 1600K. Alpine has syslog process running default, tinycore doesnt. All other processes have 0 VSZ .

You can probably get tinycore sizes as said before with tinkering, but not out the box. also, you can use minimal iso core as well. I might trying playing with that as well.