As a recap of the results of my 0.2 release, tweaking xorg.conf did not have a huge impact on reducing memory usage. Chris suggested I should try from another direction which is to repackage the X Server. Due to time constraints and the limited availability of the Pi, I decided to repackage the X Server in an x86 environment inside my VMware Workstation virtual machine that I used in my 0.1 release. Following the steps I learned in SBR600, I installed and recreated the necessary RPM build directories. While I looked inside the X Server source package, it seems that there were a lot of unneeded packages that were included such as Xnest or devel. I generated the SPEC file that I was going to modify using:
rpm -ivh sourcepackage-name*.src.rpm
Finally, I rebuilt the package with my modified SPEC file and tested for errors using rpmlint. Rpmlint showed no errors so I reinstalled this new package and tested for the memory usage again. Memory usage showed insignificant changes. The default X Server in my virtual machine was using around 38mb of memory. The modified X Server I installed showed around 37mb of memory used.
However, it seems that the X Server on the x86 platform used less memory compared to the ARM on the Raspberry Pi which was around 43mb. I can two reasons for my results in this release. Either the changes I made when I rebuilt the X Server package were not important in reducing memory usage or the X Server generally requires that much memory.
I have included my SRPM, RPM, common files used and SPEC file for others to take a look at. I hope others will have more success than me.
The PowerPoint I used during my presentation can be found here. I’ve also updated changes I made in my original project plan for my 3 releases here.
toomymon 