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Comment by epolanski

2 hours ago

Serious question with 1GB L3 isn't it theoretically possible to boot a full Linux without ram?

Edit: dug in it, no, because cache isn't addressable and it's directly managed by the cpu.

Intel has a cache-as-ram (CAR) mode / Non-Eviction Mode, which is what you wanted but it is only available before DRAM is brought up via core initialization. Not sure about AMD.

I used to use a full Slackware Linux distribution with X-Windows on a 486 clone with 4 Megabytes of RAM.