Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

> The gap between “over 1GB of RAM” and 8MB RSS contains the vast majority of embedded Linux devices

The gap between 16MB RAM and 64MB RAM doesn't exist, though. Literally doesn't, the components have the same cost down to a cent in the BOM.

And if you can have 64MB, then there's systemd's own true memory use (around 3-4MB) is completely immaterial.

View on HN

except thanks to availability crisis hitting the industry for the past decade you have to go with the 4mb sometimes

just look at wifi routers. in the usa and China they are all sold with 64 or 128mb ram. south America and Europe they are all 16 or 32 for no clear reason.

Do you have some examples? I have a very hard time imagining a modern Wifi router supporting the latest standards and IPv6, admin web interface and so on running on 16 MB of RAM. I also have issue with "wifi routers in Europe are all 16 or 32 MB of RAM". In what decade?

My ISP provided router also does VPN, VoIP, mesh networking, firewalling, and it's towards the lower end of feature set (as it's offered for free and not a fancy router I bought).

Are you talking about devices from the early 2000?

My TP-Link MR3020 from around 2015 only has 4^H 16 MB of ram (4 MB flash) and thus cannot even run OpenWRT anymore.

I’ve still got two MR3040. TP-Link hasn’t released any update for them in years. You can run an older version of OpenWrt on them, but there’s no real point. These things don’t even support 5GHz WiFi.

Device with very nice design. I still keep it as decorative even when its a brick.

I've got a few devices that only support 2.4 B/G. They're not in common use, but using an equally legacy router is the only way for them to connect.

2015 was also almost 10 years ago.

So i guess its a brick now and there is nothing we can do about it.

Using something that's already been produced (good) is not the same as selling dead end e-waste that's so underspecced it's barely working new (bad).

That thing was overstaying it's welcome for two years even then by staying on WiFi 4. 802.11n was adopted 15 years ago.

every. single. one.

pick any modem from linksys or dlink or netgear. then buy one in south America and compare what's really inside

look at all the revB on openwrt wiki, sometimes ram lowers. sometimes arm cpu change to mediatek. often the wifi chip changes from qualcomm to rtl. and it's always the revisions sold outside of usa and China in the observation fields.

> south America and Europe they are all 16 or 32 for no clear reason

I don't know where you're getting your data from but it's clearly wrong or outdated. These are the most often sold routers in Czechia on Alza (the largest online retailer) under $100:

- TP-Link Archer AX53 (256MB)

- TP-Link Archer AX23 (128MB)

- TP-Link Archer C6 V3.2 (128MB)

- TP-Link Archer AX55 Pro (512MB?)

...

- Mercusys MR80X (256MB)

- ASUS RT-AX52 (256MB)

https://www.alza.cz/EN/best-sellers-best-wifi-routers/188430...

"Best sellers" usually means "best advertized because of worst sales".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com