Dear list members,

I was very happily surprised about your fast and friendly responses.

Thank you very much for these.

I'm answering now in one single message, so that I won't
cause four separate postings on the list. And here I go:

--

David Brownlee wrote:
 >     Welcome! ...
 >     I have a 68030 based mac, and lurk on the list anyway :)

Oh, what an overpowered box :-) :-) :-)

>     You should be able to cross compile a more recent kernel...

Yes, thank you for your affirmation. I have obtained the sources
for 1.5.3, and for 2.1, and docs about cross-compiling before my
original posting - But I need some quiet time before I'll try that,
as I don't want to accidentially mix up the environment on the
compile host.

>     ...something like a 380 or a 400 series machine could pretty
 >     much solve your memory... -> www.netbsd.org/...hardware.html

I've seen the list - well after I got the 318 :-).

Many years ago I had drafted a 68020 based system of my own. But the
processors turned out to be a bit beyond my pocket money range...
The 318 came here to comfort old ideas, and to provide some platform
for a reality check - so I don't want to go *far* above this CPU.

>     Hmm... I wonder how much memory is in http://tinyurl.com/2m5n2w

At least, it's expandable, whereas 318 is not. I've seen some
HP9000/3xx on ebay.com, but sadly, shipping costs from the US to
Germany are higher than warranted for a "just trying it out" thing.

>     One interesting test might be to boot a NetBSD-4 GENERIC and
>     cut down kernels on it.

(See below - Itsumi Tsutsui's reply.)

--

Stephan Doom Warrier wrote:
> I have 1 pair of spare 4MB RAM, which i was using in my 400Series...

Thank you for your friendly offer :-)

I'm also sending a private mail.

But here, for possible other/future searchers:

The 318 is described as "completely non expandable".

It doesn't even have an SCSI connector (although I found some 50 drilled
and routed holes on one PCB) - and its interior design differs from the
319 for which I found a service manual at www.hpmuseum.net. There is a
bus board, but both slots are used, with the CPU/FPU/MMU/RAM on the upper=

PCB, and video, serial, ethernet interfaces, and maybe more RAM, on the
lower PCB - so adding RAM *might* be possible, but not trivial - might
work after making/getting a bus plane with more slots. It is also
unsure whether the 318 ROMs would support that. And I have no docs,
nor any really urgent need that would have made me try it so far.

Should anybody ever try to do it: There are *a few* earlier posts in
the usenet re small hp300 RAM: -> 320, 330, 98258A, 948254A, DIO-II, DIP.=


--

Izumi Tsutsui wrote:
 > I've put a shrinked netbsd-4 kernel for hp318 (untested):
http://www.ceres.dti.ne.jp/~tsutsui/netbsd/netbsd-hp300-SMALL-20070824.gz=


 > kernel config:
 > [...]
 > (well, 4.0 kernel is much larger than 1.5...)

 > Note this kernel doesn't have any COMPAT options
 > so you have to prepare netbsd-4 (4.0_BETA2) userland
 > [...]
 > ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-4/

:-)

Many thanks for doing this for me!

For a first test, I'll put your 4.0 kernel
into my existing 1.5.3 environment:

kernel size on disk:
netbsd 1.5.3 DISKLESS: 1150512
netbsd 4.0   SMALL:    1140463 :-)

SYS_UBOOT from 2.1 transfers your kernel fine... and then:

NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 (SMALL) #2: Fri Aug 24 21:44:49 JST 2007
=2E..
total memory =3D 4084 KB
avail memory =3D 2340 KB :-) :-)
=2E..
(hardware apparently well recognized)...

Without the suitable environment (cannot just download,
extremely limited connection), the game currently ends with:

/bin/sh on /etc/rc terminated abnormally, going to single user mode
init: single user shell terminated, restarting.

These results look very nice. There can be 680KB more free RAM ...
Compared to my current system, where top reports only 200..300KB
free when fully up and running, that's a substantial addition. :-)

So I'll get the 4.0 userland and try again.

Even now, your help allowed me to quickly see that a kernel with less
RAM consumption is possible, that a newer kernel should still work -
and even if 4.0 would not work for any as of yet unknown reason,
your supplying suitable kernel compile options to a complete NetBSD
newbie, I highly appreciate. :-)

--

Jochen Kunz wrote:
 > I have a hp300 machine available for shipping + packing. IIRC it is a
 > 340. I may have installed NetBSD once on that machine in the 1.3 to 1.=
4
 > time frame. So it should have enough RAM. Disk is SCSI... Location is
 > Kaiserslautern Germany, makeing it almost local to J=F6rg...

Well, and another kind surprise.
I've sent a private mail to Jochen, of course :-) :-)
(Must limit my use of smileys here.)

--

Once again, thank you for all of your replies. As soon as I've
tried out anything else, I'll tell you about any new results.

Best wishes + Greetings, Joerg