so I am not asking how much virtual or physical memory you support, but rather how much memory your OS currently uses and if you already have userland code running (let's say a shell, some basic command line utilities, etc.), how much they occupy. E.g. Contiki needs ~50k of memory for a minimal system with TCP/IP stack (according to wikipedia), however that information might be outdated and I am not sure how much size (both ROM or RAM) additional tools and drivers need.
In particular I am interested in smallish implementations, that provide tools and drivers for
- little screens (character displays or pixel-based)
- keyboard and mouse drivers
- disk drivers for IDE or Flash, etc.
- maybe even sound support
On the userland side I think programs like
- basic file system tools: ls, mkdir, cp, rm, find, grep, cd, cat
- small interpreters: (sh)ells or small languages like mini py
- compilers and assemblers
- text editors
- small games like tetris, asteroids, etc.
could be considered interesting.
This post is partly inspired by the wonderful work Oscar Toledo is doing (e.g. a micro "OS" in 512 bytes: https://github.com/nanochess/bootOS) and the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) which operated the Apollo command (and lunar) module and apparently used ~37K words - which I found quite astounding.
Obviously this is an extreme but I wonder how much can be done with "little" memory (I know "little" is a flexible term but let's say 100K - 2M).
Thanks for your answers and happy hacking.
