Android donut on 64MiB RAM
Diego Rondini
== PREFACE ==
Before receiving messages telling that "Android requires at least 128MiB",
"running Android on 64MiB is not supported at all" an so on, I want to let you
know that I'm aware it's not recommended, but I want to try nonetheless.
First of all let me share the most relevant link of the research work I've
done so far (could be useful to somebody else):
http://www.drakaz.com/2010/04/30/android-memory-thresholds/
http://tinyurl.com/android-mem-disc-1
http://tinyurl.com/android-mem-disc-2
http://elinux.org/Android_Memory_Usage
http://tinyurl.com/android-mem-explanation
http://elinux.org/Android_Notes#oom_killer_info
http://lwn.net/Articles/317814/
http://wiki.cyanogenmod.com/index.php?title=Swap_and_Compcache
The most important point is that I'm not interested in building a full
featured smartphone, but just trying to use Android as a "touchscreen Linux"
so I don't need all the features it provides. Again, I know Android has not
been thought as a general purpose OS, but for sure I'm not the first trying to
use it outside the smartphone world!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/now_audio_admiral_touch/
== DATA ==
I've compared Donut and Froyo memory consumption and figured out the first fits
better on low memory devices. That said Donut works smoothly on 128MiB while
it starts having some issues with just 64MiB. It's not disastrous though: the
system can start correctly and so can the applications. The real downside is
that most of the time it's not able to keep more than one "big" application
opened at a time, because of the lowmemorykiller. For example if I start the
Browser the Launcher gets killed, and viceversa if I get back to home.
I've already found some workarounds / hacks just to figure out were I can act
to improve the situation:
- using the Sample Home instead of the regular Launcher permits to keep both
the Home and the Browser opened at the same time;
http://developer.android.com/resources/samples/Home/index.html
- enabling CompCache and using 15MiB of compcache swap permits to keep both
the regular Launcher and the Browser opened at the same time.
Lowmemorykiller stills comes in play when multiple applications are opened,
but as I found out something can be done to improve the situation.
With stock configuration (no Sample Home, nor CompCache) I get this results:
http://pastebin.com/ArU0ynjG
As you can see I get around 20MiB of "Cached" (which is the same as android-
mem-explanation link tells) and 25MiB of "Inactive".
== QUESTIONS ==
Are so high values of "Cached" and "Inactive" reasonable values for a 64MiB
device or maybe tuning them to be a bit less could give performance
improvements (in terms of one or two more applications opened at a time)? If
you think it's worth a try, any idea of how I could tune the values?
How can I disable Java services like com.android.mms? Is removing the
associated .apk the best solution?
Any other recommendation / suggestion? except for "don't do it!", I mean :)
Thank you so much and regards,
Diego