It occurred to me that Ian Zagorskih wrote in gmane.os.netbsd.general:
> For example, i'm running NetBSD/i386 2.x on systems with 16Mb or 32Mb of RAM 
> and i cannot say it needs all of this. At least i have 2/3 of RAM available 
> for userland apps. I believe NetBSD can boots just fine with 8Mb of RAM but i 
> don't have such systems anymore to test it.

Well, my trusty old laptop has only 48 MB, and I must confess that I'm 
sometimes not sure I really understand the logic behind having a considerable
file cache while swapping at the same time.