Performance specs

[jakirkham]

I know this is still a bit early in development. However, it would be nice to get some idea of what this is going to require to run. One of the nice features of the original boot2docker is that it was so lightweight (e.g. minimal memory usage, all in memory OS, quick startup/shutdown time, barebones feature-wise). This made it useable even for sophisticated calculations on a laptop. What sort of specs will/are we looking at with this new version of boot2docker.

[tianon]

The spec requirements of this should be about the same as the original -- 1GB of RAM or more, and any Debian-compatible system should be supported (which is the majority of systems).

[jakirkham]

Do you have a rough idea of what fraction of that ~1GB is taken up by the OS when running and some idea of the target fraction?

[tianon]

We don't have any unambiguously defined targets for the runtime footprint (just "small") -- as-is, it's a very, very minimal Debian installation (base on the "minbase" debootstrap variant), so it should be really small, but I haven't actually measured to know what it ends up being in practice.

[jakirkham]

Sure, I understand. Please keep me posted. I'd like to have some idea of where this stands relative to the legacy image once it is feeling more finished, but before it becomes the standard.