Is it possible to install 64-bit Linux on 2GB of RAM?

Question

linux

I put openSUSE on 2 GB of RAM, it automatically got up as x86_64, won't this kill the hardware? Maybe I should have set it to 32 bits?

Answer 1

costs xubuntu 64bit for 2gb ram.
there are no restrictions on the lower memory limit

Answer 2

You can install it, but with 2 GB it makes little sense, since the x86 architecture code uses RAM space more efficiently somewhere in 1.3-1.5 times - simply because the size of pointers in x86_64 is 2 times larger. This also applies to shared libraries. It is clear that if both processes allocate 1 GB, it will be the same gigabyte both there and there, but if we talk about overhead - how much memory needs to be used to deploy the executable code to the RAM, for example, then x86 is more modest. There is a slight performance penalty (x86 has fewer RAM registers), but this can often be neglected, but brakes due to swap are usually more difficult to neglect.
There was a project to get the best from "2 worlds" - x32 , but, alas, he did not score a critical mass to make everything spin.