From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Dec 13 09:27:12 1995 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA06184 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 13 Dec 1995 09:27:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from cls.net (freeside.cls.de [192.129.50.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id JAA06176 for ; Wed, 13 Dec 1995 09:27:07 -0800 (PST) Received: by mail.cls.net (Smail3.1.29.1) from allegro.lemis.de (192.109.197.134) with smtp id ; Wed, 13 Dec 95 17:27 GMT From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany Phone: +49-6637-919123 Fax: +49-6637-919122 Reply-To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey) Received: (grog@localhost) by allegro.lemis.de (8.6.9/8.6.9) id SAA00867; Wed, 13 Dec 1995 18:07:56 +0100 Message-Id: <199512131707.SAA00867@allegro.lemis.de> Subject: Re: running in 2 MB... To: jkh@freefall.freebsd.org (Jordan K. Hubbard) Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 18:07:56 +0100 (MET) Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers) In-Reply-To: <15606.818699917@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Dec 11, 95 08:38:37 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk Jordan K. Hubbard writes: > > > (I could recompile elsewhere, but would like to use the machine for > > some light-weight work.) > > Light-weight? Yeah, no kidding! Like what, exactly? Running a > shell, echoing arguments, that kinda thing? :-) :-) -- Begin war-story mode -- Some years ago, when I worked for Tandem, we shared offices with Tandem's Frankfurt network node. This machine ran well without too much difficulty with minimal memory, since it was mainly concerned with shuffling data buffers from one line to another. One day, the network manager came to me and said "we've just installed the latest and greatest version of Guardian on \NCEURO [the network machine], and I can't get it to boot. It just hangs." I went and had a look, and he was right. I took a dump and found that the machine had exactly 3 (three) pages (of 2048 bytes) of memory free after loading the kernel. Turned out that that was one too few: the system monitor (think: init) had paged its code space out before it had got around to enabling swapping. -- End war-story mode -- I think there are probably quite a few situations where this little memory would still work. I don't think I'd want to use it as an X workstation, though. Greg