Subject: Re: Installation questions.
To: None <port-arm32@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Robert Black <r.black@IC.AC.UK>
List: port-arm32
Date: 06/17/1996 09:56:35
On Jun 14, 10:07pm, Neil Hoggarth wrote:
> Subject: Installation questions.
> Okay, my new RiscPC hasn't turned up yet, but I want to be ready to roll
> as soon as it does! :-)
>
> I've read through the Beta release installation notes and some of the
> materials on the web server, and I have a couple of questions:
>
> 1) What do I need to take into account when choosing the size of my
>    swap partition? Is 4.4BSD like previous BSDs (I've administered
>    SunOS 4 in the past) where one has to back all physical RAM by
>    swap space in order to get to use the memory at all, or is it one
>    of these systems where the total virtual memory is the sum of
>    physical memory and swap space?

Right, under 4.4BSD the total virtual memory is effectively greater than the
sum of the physical memory and swap space. Executable code just gets thrown
away rather than paged out and then gets paged back in from the binary. One
thing to watch is that because we don't have shared libraries most of your data
will spend most of its life on disk. Also, when we go to run-time linkage the
executables will start getting paged out. I use about 60Meg of swap and this is
fine for heavy use of X, xemacs and gcc.

> 2) Do I have to have separate / and /usr filesystems or can I lump
>    everything under /, by just not setting aside a /usr partition for
>    example? (no debate on the desirability of this approach, please! - I know
>    all the arguments for and against, and on a system of my very own with
>    no lusers trying to fill up the disks, I'd go for the simplicity and
>    flexibility of having all my free disk space in one place given the
>    chance).

You can lump everything together under / if you like. I'm not sure whether the
standard install procedure makes this easy to do but since you appear to know
what you're doing I'm sure you'll have no trouble with it. The only reason I
have split / and /usr is that my disk is larger than 512Meg and sometimes gets
used in machines without the new filecore. This means the / partition has to be
within the first 512Meg if I am to be able to boot native.

> 3) Which kernel should I be downloading, for bootstrapping the system
>    for the first time? Do I just go for the most recent one in the
>    beta/kernels subdirectory of the FTP server or should I use the one
>    at the top level of the beta directory, or what?

Yup, go for the most recent which nobody has screamed about (probably means its
a good idea to check the dates and pull the newest one which is more than a
week old).

Cheers

Rob

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