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Excuse me if this is a dumb question. I've been experimenting with this old nas box i bought, cross compiling anything and everything i could get my hands on. And now i want to take it a step further and create a minimalistic os to the best of my ability.

It has 256M of ram, 128M of nand flash memory and an old single core Marvell kirkwood processor running around 1.2 GHz on the armv5te architecture. So it is fair to say that its pretty limited in resources. BUT, it has two sata2 ports and i just so happen to have a spare ssd laying around. I made a custom initramfs for it. It just mounts the sata ssd partition which contains the rootfs and does switch_root. The initramfs along with the kernel and device tree blob is written onto the nand and loaded and executed by u-boot.

It works pretty nicely but i've been thinking, if i have this massive ssd, (compared to the 128M flash 240G is a lot) i could maybe do stuff like drop busybox for a more "desktop oriented" setup?

So my question is this, would systemd make a noticable impact to the performance of other programs? Would it take up a noticable ammount of ram / cpu time? Has anyone ever tried running systemd in embedded environments?

I also though about installing a real distro on it, maybe something small like alpine, would that work?

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  • welcome to U&L, you seems to handle installation pretty well, however 256 MB is very low, and likely system will always be swaping (systemd or no systemd) if using desktop environment.
    – Archemar
    Commented May 21 at 7:27
  • This question is far from being dumb. Actually, for some embedded linux devices, systemd is preferred, because you can achieve shorter startup times with less optimisation effort. Yocto (nowadays the preferred way to create your custom embedded Linux distro) offers to choose systemd as init system. Have you thought about using yocto instead of some off-the-shelf distro?
    – Philippos
    Commented May 24 at 11:26

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first off - cool project - well done! systemd is used on embedded systems, you can limit its memory usage if you need to. Only per/mem issues I've see has been with systemd journalling growing over time, but can prune that also.

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