Alpine Linux 3.23 - 23mb ram | 71mb disk - guide

VPS

Great lowend stuff, remembers me of all that 128mb vps scams

TemporiousOne

I'm actually pretty surprised what can be run on a 128mb instance of Alpine Linux. Managed to get Wireguard, Shadowsocks, AmneziaWG and Python FastAPI running concurrently. Some tweaking with Zram and swap needed though.

AnthonySmith

@TemporiousOne said:
I'm actually pretty surprised what can be run on a 128mb instance of Alpine Linux. Managed to get Wireguard, Shadowsocks, AmneziaWG and Python FastAPI running concurrently. Some tweaking with Zram and swap needed though.

Amazing low end spirit! Please write a post about your stack, what you are running and sample configs if you have time!

Neoon

See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

AnthonySmith

@Neoon said:
See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

I don't understand? I just use the stock alpine images that they publish they are only 180mb in total for the entire image.

Maybe proxmox bloat is punching you in the face?

Happy to send you the source qcow2 and the TierHive cloud init yaml files if you want.

I have not used proxmox meaningfully since around 2015 I just know it started making strange choices about a lot of things which resulted in more strange choices and bloat.

somik

@AnthonySmith said:

@Neoon said:
See, I couldn't replicate that wizzard magic of yours.
The problem seems to be the booting phase.

if I go below 200MB on boot, the VM fails to load into ramdisk.
Despite trying to reduce Initramfs etc.

With a custom kernel, you probably could pull this off.

I don't understand? I just use the stock alpine images that they publish they are only 180mb in total for the entire image.

Maybe proxmox bloat is punching you in the face?

Happy to send you the source qcow2 and the TierHive cloud init yaml files if you want.

I have not used proxmox meaningfully since around 2015 I just know it started making strange choices about a lot of things which resulted in more strange choices and bloat.

@AnthonySmith is probably using the alpine image for Virtual systems:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.23.4-x86_64.iso

Rest of the alpine images are all over 300 MB: https://alpinelinux.org/downloads/

somik

The virt iso seems to boot fine in 128 MB ram in proxmox VM:

AnthonySmith

@somik said: @AnthonySmith is probably using the alpine image for Virtual systems:
https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/x86_64/alpine-virt-3.23.4-x86_64.iso

Not using ISO's

go here: https://alpinelinux.org/cloud/

Then change cloud provider to generic, set the options:

https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.23/releases/cloud/generic_alpine-3.23.4-x86_64-bios-cloudinit-r0.qcow2

Which gives you the official stripped down build for KVM with cloud init injected virtual machine build with none of the extra crap you dont need which bloats everything and then you have a system that cant even boot on 200 mb

Neoon

See, I have been setup for failure from the start.
I didn't try with BIOS / Seabios, these images where UEFI, fk me.

somik

@AnthonySmith the original post needs an update for tierhive or latest alpine version.