From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Jan 6 15:52:41 2010 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1677F106566C for ; Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:52:41 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from bruce@cran.org.uk) Received: from muon.cran.org.uk (unknown [IPv6:2001:470:1f09:679::1]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D640B8FC18 for ; Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:52:40 +0000 (UTC) Received: from unknown (client-82-3-230-119.glfd.adsl.virginmedia.com [82.3.230.119]) (using TLSv1 with cipher DHE-RSA-AES128-SHA (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by muon.cran.org.uk (Postfix) with ESMTPSA id EEB508311; Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:52:45 +0000 (UTC) Date: Wed, 6 Jan 2010 15:52:59 +0000 From: Bruce Cran To: Da Rock Message-ID: <20100106155259.00000ee4@unknown> In-Reply-To: <1262685825.15832.5.camel@laptop1.herveybayaustralia.com.au> References: <1262685825.15832.5.camel@laptop1.herveybayaustralia.com.au> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.7.2cvs27 (GTK+ 2.16.0; i586-pc-mingw32msvc) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Tuning for very little RAM X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 06 Jan 2010 15:52:41 -0000 On Tue, 05 Jan 2010 20:03:45 +1000 Da Rock wrote: > Its been a while- work's has been keeping me very busy for months now. > > I have revived an old laptop which has very little RAM, and it is > absolutely hammering the swap. > > I'm trying to set it up as a demo for some skeptics with no money, so > I need email, internet (with plugins), openoffice, acrobat, and wine. > > Aside from all that though, for the academics of it how can I help > this situation? The laptop has around 100MB RAM, with 16k free, and > has a new install of FreeBSD 8.0. You can save a bit of memory by building a custom kernel. First, remove any options you don't need such as INET6, NFS, AUDIT etc. Then, you can replace "device ata" with more specific drivers, and "device mii" with specific PHY drivers for your NIC. On a 128MB box I have that's running 8-STABLE my kernel is just 4.1MB. You should also be able to build Xorg so it'll use less memory - for example by not requiring hald but getting it to read the configuration from xorg.conf instead. You can also tell FreeBSD to agressively swap idle processes out by setting vm.swap_idle_enabled to 1. -- Bruce Cran