*BSD News Article 5432


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Xref: sserve comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit:6 comp.unix.bsd:5480
Newsgroups: comp.unix.pc-clone.32bit,comp.unix.bsd
Path: sserve!manuel!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!caen!destroyer!terminator!news
From: pauls@icecreambar.css.itd.umich.edu (Paul Southworth)
Subject: Re: Attempted summary (Was Re: UNIX on a PC clone)
Message-ID: <1992Sep22.220331.21122@terminator.cc.umich.edu>
Sender: news@terminator.cc.umich.edu (Usenet Owner)
Reply-To: pauls@umich.edu
Organization: University of Michigan
References: <19ntp1INN2qo@almaak.usc.edu>
Date: Tue, 22 Sep 1992 22:03:31 GMT
Lines: 49

Ajay Shah writes
| This file is a attempt at a quick summary of the Unix options for
| 386 boxes.  It is not monolithic or complete; it's supposed to be
| a quick first look at the field.  It is not a objective, factual
| summary; instead it reflects our biases and experiences.
| 
|         - Ajay Shah (ajayshah@usc.edu)
|           Shuvam Misra (shuvam@jogin.cse.iitb.ernet.in)

[...]

| Free 386-BSD
| ------------
| 
| This is a free BSD for the 386.  It does NFS and X.
| Grab it from agate.berkeley.edu.  Bill Jolitz is writing a book on it.
| 
| It has a neat, small kernel, and is stable enough to run for a week or
| more without crashing/hanging. It works fine with 4MB RAM and 80MB
| disk.  Running X however needs 8MB RAM, and supports only vanilla VGA.
| The TCP/IP implementation in this is functional, but not optimised.
| This means that FTP throughput is about 5KB/sec on Ethernet, when
| almost anything else gives you about 70KB to 100KB per second.
| 
| Read comp.unix.bsd. That is almost entirely Jolitz's 386BSD now.

I don't know the technical ins and outs of TCP/IP, but with the default  
installation of 386BSD, a thin-net ether system and a 3COM Etherlink II, I  
easily get over 60kb / second when retrieving documents from the site on  
my 386BSD machine (anonymous site--try it yourself) via ftp to one of the  
busier machines in the net at work.  When making the reverse transfer with  
the same files, I obtained better than 230Kb / second.  Not too shabby for  
not being "optimized".

Furthermore the system has crashed so far only for understandable reasons.   
That is, only while compiling, and then as far as I can tell because the  
installation's default swap quantity is too low.  That's an important  
thing to note for beginning installers -- DON'T INSTALL IT UNTIL YOU HAVE  
FIGURED OUT HOW TO MAKE SWAP BIGGER OR YOU WILL MAKE LOTS MORE WORK FOR  
YOURSELF LATER, AND/OR JUST END UP REINSTALLING.  Just something to keep  
in mind.

Other than that, the machine has never crashed, and it has been on line  
continuously since the beginning of July.

Paul Southworth                    |     ftp redspread.css.itd.umich.edu
Consulting and Support Services    |        Anonymous Political Archives
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