Overhead of rpm-ostree

I’m curious as to how much overhead is added to the OS when it’s ostree based vs. a traditional package installed OS. Is there more, less, about the same? I’d be interested to see an ostree based distro for these retro handheld devices but wondering if it would take a hit to performance in doing so.

I’m sure they use more memory since flatpaks load their own private libraries for every application. Other than that, I wouldn’t expect much of a difference, but I don’t know.

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I’ve been using Silverblue more often than Workstation lately, in VMs with identical resources allocated, and haven’t really noticed any difference in performance in everyday desktop tasks.

When updating, download size is usually bigger, probably because of the way update images are provided as chunks.

There’s a bit more disk space needed too, since there are at least two deployments at any time on the system.

All in all, nothing having significant impact in my opinion, as compared to traditional OSes.

I was actually thinking of just to get a base OS up and running, like with CoreOS or Fedora IoT.

Maybe I should run some tests like this of my own. Fedora Server and Fedora IoT Edition in some VMs and see what the load is like. I can understand the space difference, I was more interested in CPU and Memory usage.

Once installed, Fedora CoreOS and IoT are not much different from a traditional package mode server OS in terms of CPU and memory consumption. Both are designed to be lightweight, minimal, monolithic and container-focused. They require no more machine resources than the package-based Fedora Server, perhaps even less.

As far as I know, for installing additional software outside of the recommended containers, in the medium/long term rpm-ostree will likely be deprecated in favor of derived container images and perhaps system extension images.

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