From owner-freebsd-stable Fri Jan 18 19:10:49 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from rover.village.org (rover.bsdimp.com [204.144.255.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id AC16537B402 for ; Fri, 18 Jan 2002 19:10:45 -0800 (PST) Received: from harmony.village.org (harmony.village.org [10.0.0.6]) by rover.village.org (8.11.3/8.11.3) with ESMTP id g0J3Ail34064 for ; Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:10:44 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@village.org) Received: from localhost (warner@rover2.village.org [10.0.0.1]) by harmony.village.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g0J3Ahx04138 for ; Fri, 18 Jan 2002 20:10:43 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from imp@village.org) Date: Fri, 18 Jan 2002 12:05:16 -0700 (MST) Message-Id: <20020118.120516.62411486.imp@village.org> To: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD Memory Requirements Legacy and Present From: "M. Warner Losh" 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> X-Mailer: Mew version 2.1 on Emacs 21.1 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG In message: <3C47AE08.24F97802@www.kuzbass.ru> Eugene Grosbein 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message