*BSD News Article 25818


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From: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.apps
Subject: Re: Great Expectation
Keywords: BSD
Message-ID: <2gsi1j$6p3@pdq.coe.montana.edu>
Date: 10 Jan 94 21:41:07 GMT
Article-I.D.: pdq.2gsi1j$6p3
References: <CJEson.M2w@eng_ser1.ie.cuhk.hk>
Organization: Montana State University - Bozeman MT
Lines: 85
NNTP-Posting-Host: bsd.coe.montana.edu

In article <CJEson.M2w@eng_ser1.ie.cuhk.hk>,
Ng Hin-Kwong Benson <hkng2@cuse1.se.cuhk.hk> wrote:
>
>	Someone told me FreeBSD no longer support 4MB 486.

FreeBSD 1.0 had difficulties on certain 4MB machines, and has been stated
by others more technically qualified than me that many times the problem
is due to bad hardware.

>	Is it true?

To a point.  However, the next patch release will have code in it (hopefully)
to work around bad cache problems, and some recent research into this problem
may prove enlightening to VLB users.

>	If so, I think it's better to state this clear and attach to the
>distribution. 

It has been a high priority to get this problem solved for all users by
the next major release (a couple months at the earliest).  However, it
appears than FreeBSD-current not only has the problem licked for good
hardware but also increases performance on these machines by a
significant amount.

Also, if you plan to do lots of compiling and such, I would suggest using
gcc1 instead of gcc2.  gcc1 is a lot friendlier on the machine (doesn't
require as many resources), so generally all problems folks have compiling
the world on small memory machines go away when using gcc1.

>	What I have in mind is a system with the size of coherent or qnx
>but like BSD's well-supported source tools. Is there such one?

Try out FreeBSD.

>	I just wonder about the memory organization of FreeBSD, I mean
>without X window. Consider Ken Thompson's days and our Apple II's high
>school days, why is it possible to provide a more elegant kernel in the
>past but not the present ? 

This could get into politics and flamage, but basically the stock FreeBSD
kernel provides a much larger set of features than the original Unix kernel.

(Some would argue that these features aren't necessary, but that's for a
different newsgroup than this one).  Basically if you want Networking
and a faster file-system and FPU emulation and virtual memory and ....

>I know this is again the paradox of what in
>the comp.os.research debate. But what if 4MB 486 machine is almost the
>most reasonable machine to most of us - students who have to work in
>orde to buy ourself one.

Most machines come with 8MB now.  To be honest, if you want to do lots of
compilation and such, 4MB is pretty tight.  It'll work, but you'll get
much better results by adding another 4MB of memory.

>	Coherent is a good check point of well balanced memory and
>functionality, at least from what I have been told.

Except that it has no VM system.  If you need more than 4M of processes,
you can't run the program.

>	Can anyone just give me a set of typical memory usage data on
>the BSD and especially window like how much it cost to open up a new
>window.

What kind of window?  A text window?  X alone takes up about ~2MB just
to run, and you're looking at ~1.2 MB for the kernel and related processes,
plus whatever daemons you run.  

>	BSD is good but what's the point if I cant even use it with 4MB
>ram in even just a text mode?!

It works in text mode quite well, but you can't go off and do memory
intensive applications (using many of the GNU tools is a memory
intensive operation. :( )



Nate

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