From owner-freebsd-chat Tue May 12 02:36:33 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id CAA04508 for freebsd-chat-outgoing; Tue, 12 May 1998 02:36:33 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from gilgamesch.bik-gmbh.de (gilgamesch.bik-gmbh.de [194.233.237.91]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id CAA04503 for ; Tue, 12 May 1998 02:36:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from cracauer@gilgamesch.bik-gmbh.de) Received: (from cracauer@localhost) by gilgamesch.bik-gmbh.de (8.8.8/8.7.3) id LAA27764; Tue, 12 May 1998 11:38:48 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: <19980512113848.48150@cons.org> Date: Tue, 12 May 1998 11:38:48 +0200 From: Martin Cracauer To: Brett Glass , =?iso-8859-1?Q?Dag-Erling_Coidan_Sm=F8rgrav_?= , "Jason C. Wells" Cc: Ben Cohen , freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: PicoBSD References: <"Jason <199805082217.QAA25075@lariat.lariat.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Mutt 0.89.1i In-Reply-To: <199805082217.QAA25075@lariat.lariat.org>; from Brett Glass on Fri, May 08, 1998 at 04:09:12PM -0600 Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org In <199805082217.QAA25075@lariat.lariat.org>, Brett Glass wrote: > At 09:14 PM 5/8/98 +0200, Dag-Erling Coidan Smørgrav wrote: > > >To quote the PicoBSD page (), > >PicoBSD is a one-floppy version of FreeBSD 3.0-current, which in its > >different variations allows you to have secure dialup access, small > >diskless router or even a dial-in server. And all this on only one > >standard 1.44MB floppy - no need to sacrifice over 100MB of your > >precious HDD space. > > I noticed that it didn't use gzipped binaries. Why? A gzipped binary needs to be uncompressed completely before it can be executed. And it needs its own virtual memory pages (for all the binary, not only the parts that are actually executed), as compared to a normal binary which is backed up the text pages of the binary on the filesystem and reads only those pages that contain instructions you actually call. In a word, you need much more RAM (each running binary needs space for both its compressed and uncompress version) and delay starting the binary more than one would expect. You should take into account that this doesn't take space on the floppy in the case of PicoBSD. PicoBSD doesn't use the floppy as root filesystem, but has a filesystem image inside the kernel which is compressed along with most of the kernel by kzip. It is then decompressed (the whole filesystem) into a memory filesystem. Personally, I use one-floppy FreeBSD systems with the root filesystem on the floppy, and therefore compress some binaries i.e. those that are executed only once at startup or are for emergency only. Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer http://www.cons.org/cracauer BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany http://www.bsdhh.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message