2014-03-22, 09:25
(2014-03-22, 08:46)b1m1 Wrote: I was wondering if the size increase would soon make openelec impossible to run on a 256Mb Pi.
Don't see why it should, the 256MB Pi has never been able to load SYSTEM into RAM so the OpenELEC distribution can continue increasing in size through the addition of optional extra modules and code without any significant risk to 256MB Pi users, it will just require more SD/Flash storage...
There's a free memory check when the system boots, and if there is less than 364544KB physical RAM free (or noram is present in cmdline.txt) then SYSTEM will not be loaded into RAM. I guess it's possible that eventually 512MB Pis may no longer be able to load SYSTEM into RAM but there's still a pretty long way to go before that happens on systems with 128MB allocated to GPU (which will have 384MB free). If the SYSTEM image grows to 150MB or so, then it may be time to stop OpenELEC from loading into RAM on 512MB hardware.
I added noram to cmdline.txt on my 512MB Pi a very long time ago and apart from the extra 100MB+ of physical RAM available I haven't noticed any other change, and my boot device is an old unidentified 2GB SD card that pre-dates the Class XX system!
Switching to a 256MB/256MB GPU split will also automatically stop SYSTEM from loading into RAM on 512MB devices.