Return to BSD News archive
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!festival!aisb!cogsci!tfb From: tfb@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Tim Bradshaw) Subject: Re: [NetBSD] Running on a 2Meg machine.F In-Reply-To: "Ingo Cyliax"'s message of Mon, 10 Jan 1994 08:33:22 -0500 Message-ID: <TFB.94Jan11152244@burns.cogsci.ed.ac.uk> Lines: 23 Sender: news@aisb.ed.ac.uk (Network News Administrator) Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh References: <2gpi0m$f5b@fw.novatel.ca> <1994Jan10.083325.9481@news.cs.indiana.edu> Date: 11 Jan 1994 15:22:44 GMT Lines: 23 * Ingo Cyliax wrote: > I too have tried this on a 2.5Mb machine (386sx 20Mhz) with 80Mb ide. > Compiling a "Hello World" program takes about a minute...after killing > off all unneeded daemons and building a tiny kernel (on another machine, > of course), I was able to get it down to 45 seconds.... running 'small' > programs like tip, rlogin wasn't that bad at all. Even vi ran OK. > What's amazing is that it works at all. Why is it amazing? I learnt Unix on a BSD4.2 machine with 2 meg of memory supporting up to 8 users (no trouble, probably could have done more but we only had 8 serial lines) and large Lisp jobs (albeit a bit slowly). I could run emacs & a small lisp under it on this box with no noticable paging, I don't think the OS & daemons used more than 700K. You could get a window system for these things too, though I suspect an extra meg would have helped there. What I really find amazing is how much more memory and mips I now need to run the same programs at the same speed as I did on that machine. --tim