At Tue, 11 Sep 2012 22:42:39 -0400 (EDT), Mouse
<mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost> wrote:
Subject: Re: 80386 support
>
> >> A 12M ramdisk (plus the kernel) isn't my idea of "_really_ low". My
> >> idea of "_really_ low" is more like 2M.
> > However I don't think I ever ran any kind of unix on any 32-bit
> > machine with just 2MB of main memory, or if I did it was just to see
> > if it could boot.
>
> I don't think I did either. I'm pretty sure my hp300 with 5M is the
> smallest-RAM machine I've tried to run anything Unixy on.
So, 2MB is less than 5MB, and yet you want to run something that's not
just unix-y but a full blown self-hosted NetBSD on a 2MB machine??? I
really don't get what you are trying to say.
You might get NetBSD to boot on a 3MB machine, with networking still in
the kernel, and assuming you use a fully crunchgen'ed user-land, but
you're not likely going to run GCC on it for any significant sized
source file, and even rebuilding everything with PCC would still
probably thrash the machine to death unless you find a smaller and more
memory-efficient linker to knit it together with. I'm not sure of the
code-size increase with PCC for 80386, but if it's anything like what it
is for VAX then you might still have thrashing problems booting your
rebuilt system back to multi-user mode again too.
--
Greg A. Woods
Planix, Inc.
<woods%planix.com@localhost> +1 250 762-7675 http://www.planix.com/
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