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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!newshost.marcam.com!news.kei.com!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!startide.ctr.columbia.edu!wpaul From: wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu (Bill Paul) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.0R Date: 26 Nov 1994 21:50:33 GMT Organization: Columbia University Center for Telecommunications Research Lines: 50 Message-ID: <3b8aj9$2mf@sol.ctr.columbia.edu> References: <Czw36t.F0@bbc.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: startide.ctr.columbia.edu X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Daring to challenge the will of the almighty Leviam00se, Phil Layton (phill@rd.bbc.co.uk) had the courage to say: : I'm in the process of installing FreeBSD Release 2.0. When the install program : tries to do a newfs on /dev/rwd0a I get the error Fatal Exec (/stand/newfs) : failed, code 9 led by vm-pageout - out of swap. I'm doing the install on : an old 386SX20, 3Megs RAM I've cobbled together as a test machine. It was : quite happy to run 1.1.5. Can anybody identify what the error code is : telling me please : -- The error code is perfectly clear: the system ran out of swap. I had this problem when I tried to install 2.0-ALPHA on a 386SX16 with only 4 megs of RAM. I managed to get further than you: I was able to get all the way to the installation of the bindist before I ran into memory problems. The trouble then was that even though I already had a 20 meg swap partition set up on my hard disk, it was never enabled. The 2.0 kernel doesn't start swapping at all until a swapon command is issued, and somehow the install failed to issue it. I had to drop out to the shell prompt and turn swapping on manually in order to finish the install. The root of the problem is the install program: it's huge. It's actually several different programs (cpio, mount, ifconfig, newfs, route, sh, etc...) all rolled into one binary that's over 1 meg in size. Presumeably this was done to save space (it may be that several small statically linked binaries take up more room than one really big one). If you don't have enough RAM and swapping isn't enabled, you can have all sorts of problems with this thing. There's only two things you can do at this point: - Get some more RAM. Maybe another meg would do it. - Try to turn on swapping as soon as you get your hard disk labeled. If, for example, your swap partition isn /dev/wd0b, you'll need to press ESCAPE to get to the shell prompt and type 'swapon /dev/wd0b' as soon as you've written your disklabel. If you're lucky, this will buy you enough elbow room to get through the first part of the install. Once swapping is enabled, you can type 'exit' or ^D to get back to the install program. Note that you might have to do this again after the system boots from your hard disk for the first time. This was where my installation died, and although I sent in a bug report to freebsd-bugs@freebsd.org about it, it's possible that swapping may still not be activated correctly at this stage. -- -Bill Paul wpaul@ctr.columbia.edu