Subject: Re: Trouble installing on IBM z50
To: None <port-hpcmips@netbsd.org>
From: Miles Nordin <carton@Ivy.NET>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 02/07/2003 18:27:26
>>>>> "fc" == Florian Cramer <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> writes:

    fc> "Try again" message is ambiguous; it should rather be "Try
    fc> again with corrected parameters"

or ``try again and plug in the network cable this time,'' or ``try
again and hold your 802.11 radio a little higher.''  I think that
message may be as ambiguous as the error it reports.

However the rest of your complaints with sysinst were great and long
overdue---I've been annoyed by almost all that stuff but never had the
concentration to write it down cleanly.

I don't know what to tell you about the partition layout.  I didn't
use sysinst for my hpcmips---it was a long time ago but I think I
stuck the disk into a little-endian laptop that was already running
NetBSD insetad of using sysinst.

I like to make / as small as possible, which sounds like what you want
except that you're wondering how small is possible.

I make /var -> usr/var.  This not only makes / smaller, but also makes
its size less variable.  If you do this, you should adjust
critical_filesystems_* in /etc/rc.conf

# normally, critical_filesystems_local="/var", 
#           critical_filesystems_remote="/usr"
# but we have /var -> /usr/var
critical_filesystems_local="/usr /var"
critical_filesystems_remote=""


Here is my disk usage for current-20021205:

\h:\w$ df -k
Filesystem  1K-blocks     Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a       31671    19471     10616    64%    /
/dev/wd0e      851201   703302    105338    86%    /usr
mfs:125         15839       15     15032     0%    /tmp
\h:\w$ uname -a
NetBSD balthasar 1.6K NetBSD 1.6K (BALTHASAR) #3: Sun Jan  5 08:16:03 EST 2003     carton@castrovalva:/scratch/src/sys/arch/hpcmips/compile/BALTHASAR hpcmips

The 'Used' column of / will be larger for NetBSDs before ld_elf.so
moved from /usr/libexec to /libexec.  It would also be larger if there
were a /rescue, but I think someone has turned this feature off for
hpcmips.

i sure wish i had 64 - 128MB of ram instead of 32.  lots of ram is so
key to this whole low-power slow-disk embedded scene.

-- 
I made the mistake of glancing at the linux drivers but my eyes
started bleeding.
		-- Herb Peyerl