Raspberry not booting with 16MB memory for GPU

[gcala]

Hi,
I'm migrating my Raspberry Pi 256M from Raspbian to Archlinux. My main concern until now is that I can't set the overall GPU memory to 16MB (I'm using it headless). When doing so Raspberry does not boot. The minum amount of memory I can use is 64 and this is a real waste of resources, in addition to making difficult the simultaneous use of some services (owncloud, pyload, mediatomb, rtorrent). Can this problem be solved?

Very thanks.

[moonman]

48 seems to be the minimum to make it boot. It can't be solved becaise of hardware limitations.

[gcala]

@moonman, I don't think so since raspbian and opensuse boot with 240/16 split.

[moonman]

Afaik raspian doesn't boot with 16. There was a thread on their forum about this exact same question.

[tikidollracer]

the memory for the gpu is set by the raspberry pi boot loader, and should be independent of the os running on top. do you know the default boot settings shipping w/ raspbian? also, beware that the pi gpu memory usage seems pretty buggy, so unless you've dynamically measured it you won't know what you're really getting.

[gcala]

atm I'm trying opensuse and as I wrote it boots and works with only 16MB of memory for gpu:

http://wstaw.org/m/2014/03/31/raspberry-opensuse.png

Unfortunately, packages choice on opensuse is quite limited. If I can't use 240/16 split with archlinux I'm forced to reinstall raspbian, and this is a pity since I use archlinux also on desktop...

[tikidollracer]

interesting. i wonder why arch is being so greedy. if suse can do it correctly, i don't really see why arm couldn't.

[moonman]

It is likely something with kernel config. As an experiment take the kernel and modules from opensuse and see if it boots. I am sure we have many more modules included from which some may trigger this situation. Also compare the bootloader/kernels configs. You are also free to compile your own minimal kernel with only the options that YOU need, as a reference you can use defconfig provided by raspberrypi foundation. But like I said, to me it is hardware limitation.

[gcala]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('moonman', 'A')s an experiment take the kernel and modules from opensuse and see if it boots.

[moonman]

Yes, those would be the dirs