Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!news.wildstar.net!newsfeed.direct.ca!nntp.portal.ca!news.bc.net!arclight.uoregon.edu!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!bofh.dot!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!zib-berlin.de!irz401!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: FreeBSD 2.1.0 on 386DX20 w/12MB Slow... Normal? Date: 2 Jun 1996 21:03:18 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 41 Message-ID: <4osvim$sv@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <4oiog4$9od@sjx-ixn3.ix.netcom.com> <jlemonDs79DD.J04@netcom.com> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E jlemon@netcom.com (Jonathan Lemon) wrote: > - FreeBSD definitely does not work in 2MB; it can't uncompress the kernel. ``does not work'' and ``does not install'' are two entirely different things. The installation kernel is gzipped and contains a ~ 1 MB root file system image (mainly consisting of sysinstall and the basic tools required to bootstrap the installation). That's why it needs some more space for installation than a regular kernel. I've once tried to _run_ a system in only 2 MB, and partially succeeded. I've got the system into single-user, but any further activity eventually panicked it with a ``kmem_map too small''. Now, from reading the commit messages i know that the bug causing this has been found meanwhile, so perhaps i will retry this experiment some day. (The old board is still sitting on a shelf alltogether with its 8 x 256 KB SIMMs.) > - The 2.2-960328-SNAP (I had a boot floppy laying around) is much MUCH > faster at installing; 2.1R takes about 5-10 minutes to go through the > 'newfs/cpio/config ethernet' stage before getting to the actual install, > while the SNAP took about 1-2 minutes. The installation mounts the partitions now as `async', and can thus benefit from the much faster metadata updates. There's not much of an added risk (as opposed to an async file system in normal operation), if the installation goes foul, you can always retry it again. On faster machines, i've successfully (test-)installed one of the recent SNAPs in less than five minutes (SCSI machine, CD-ROM install of the bindist only). The time to load the floppy itself seems to be the longest delay. :) -- 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. ;-)