Date: Thu, 29 Nov 2001 11:34:20 +1100 From: Christopher Vance <vance@aurema.com> To: Dennis Mathiasen <dennisma@adelphia.net> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: 4-STABLE on 386? Message-ID: <20011129113420.B23381@aurema.com> In-Reply-To: <NFBBLPGAMKGJPAINGIJKAENMCIAA.dennisma@adelphia.net>; from dennisma@adelphia.net on Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 11:24:14AM -0500 References: <NFBBLPGAMKGJPAINGIJKAENMCIAA.dennisma@adelphia.net>
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On Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 11:24:14AM -0500, Dennis Mathiasen wrote: : Is it possible to install 4-STABLE on a 386DX with 8 Meg of memory? : The machine has no cd-rom. : : It appears to work normally except that the network card won't answer : a ping so it goes nowhere. I'm running 4-STABLE on a 386sx with 8MB memory. It does pppoe, ipv6, ipfw/ip6fw, and very little else. Because some of my IRQ settings were non-standard, I compiled a custom kernel on a bigger machine, and used it to replace the kernel on the first floppy, leaving the mfs on the second floppy alone. This assumes you already have 4-STABLE running on a larger machine. (I can't remember what version I was running when I last did this, but I'm sure it was after I moved to 4-STABLE. I didn't have any memory problems on that install.) I keep the kernel and userland updated by compiling on a bigger machine, and only installing on the 386. FWIW, I recently attempted to install NetBSD 1.5Y on the same machine, and found the 'tiny' install kernel didn't like something about npx (perhaps the missing 387?), and the normal install kernel ran out of memory. It seems with most free OSs these days (for appropriate values of 'free') that the memory bottleneck is found at install time, and you can usually get away with less memory after install than you need to install in the first place. An alternative you might need to investigate if memory size is an issue with your custom kernel, is to move the disk into a box with more memory, install there, including a custom kernel, and then move the disk back to the 386. Make sure your install doesn't touch the disks on the bigger machine, unless you want it to. Your network problems indicate you probably need to tweak the irqs in your kernel, so a custom kernel is probably necessary. It will also have the advantage of giving you an opportunity to shrink your kernel by omitting drivers for all the hardware you don't have, making memory size (slightly) less of a problem. -- Christopher Vance To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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