*BSD News Article 68949


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From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: Config exits on signal 11
Date: 19 May 1996 23:37:26 GMT
Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden
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eyager@novagate.com wrote:

> I have a Pentium class system with 8 megs or RAM and am running
> FreeBSD 2.1.0.  Currently I am using the generic kernal that came with
> the distribution.  When I try to run config to create a new kernal, it
> always quits on signal 11 (memory segmentation fault).  It doesn't
> matter what kernal I try to compile (LINT or GENERIC).  I also tried
> doing this under the single-user mode and it still doesn't work.

You are tight on RAM, and have too few swap space configured.

In single-user mode, you have to turn on swapping at all (swapon -a),
it's normally only done when the kernel boots to multi-user.

Should all else fail, you can create a swap file.  This is slow, but
might help you to get up & running at all.  The HOWTO is described in
the handbook (at least in recent versions, have a look at the Web page
version).

Don't forget to drastically strip down your kernel from the GENERIC
file.  If you are tight on RAM, don't enable things you won't use --
the kernel is _not_ demand-paged, it occupies memory once and forever.
Do also reduce the `maxusers', it's responsible for the size of
several kernel buffers.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)