Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 12:05:16 -0700 (MST) From: "M. Warner Losh" <imp@village.org> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Memory Requirements Legacy and Present Message-ID: <20020118.120516.62411486.imp@village.org> In-Reply-To: <3C47AE08.24F97802@www.kuzbass.ru> References: <5.1.0.14.2.20020117210634.01d8eec0@vmspop.isc.rit.edu> <3C47AE08.24F97802@www.kuzbass.ru>
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In message: <3C47AE08.24F97802@www.kuzbass.ru>
Eugene Grosbein <eugen@www.kuzbass.ru> writes:
: 4.5-RC1 can be booted to multiuser with 4Mb RAM and custom stripped-down
: kernel if one have at least 512Kb of swap. I guess it won't be very useful.
: It will run smoothly as router/NAT/traffic shaper/small network monitoring
: system with 8Mb RAM and some swap space. The amount of swap depends of
: number and size of running applications. I currently run 486SX-25/8MB RAM
: with one of 4.4-SNAPs. It acts as ethernet/modem gateway, runs sshd
: and net-snmp and is capable of serving several simultanious shell sessions
: under screen(1).
I have booted a 4.4-stable kernel (very highly stripped down) on my 4M
test box. I was able to get it configured to do my routing stuff. I
did have to turn off ttys, cron, etc. But once I did that, it seemed
reasonable enough. However, adding some more memory did help improve
the response time (I have 100M of swap on that box). I didn't install
it with sysinstall. :-)
I also have a 128MB P-133 that I use as my wireless gateway, booted
off of a 32M CF card. The only reason that i thas 128M rather than
the 8MB it came with was that I wanted the CF card to be mounted read
only (to save wear and tear on the card and to help proevent
accidents). Mounting memory file systems in 8M isn't really
possible. Oh, 128M was the smallest stick I could buy at Office MAX
when I sent there. It was a whole $25.00, and I didn't want to
special order the 64M version for $20.00.
Machines with 30-pin simms, and those with weird or non-existant
memory expansion (think laptops) are much harder to upgrade, no matter
how cheap the latest technology is. The 30-pin simms are cheap
enough, but most 486 machines that take them are limited to banks of
4, which limits the number of configurations that are possible.
I have also booted FreeBSD's standard /etc/rc scripts off of an 8MB
flash card. The minimal bootable w/o error messages size image that
I've been able to make is on the order of 6.5MB. I also, as an
experiment in the 4.2 time frame, booted a 3.95MB image that used a
heavily hacked /etc/rc* set of files, but I've lost the hacks I made
to get it that small. Both of these tests were done on machines with
32MB or more of RAM (since I needed a MFS for /dev and for /var).
Laptops that I have to install for test purposes I generally take
apart, put the 2.5" IDE disk into an adapter and plug it into either a
desktop or into another laptop depending on the hardware at hand...
Warner
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