In message <20010301121328.C34@(none)> Pavel Machek writes:
: Hi!
: 
: > OK.  I have this pipe-dream of running NetBSD on my MobilePro 400.  I
: > just purchased a replacement screen for the broken one that I have had
: > for ages.
: > 
: > I see two problems.  One, the keyboard interface for these things is
: > unknown (right?).  Two, with 4MB of RAM, that's a very tight amount of
: > memory.  There's a serial port and a single pccard slot, so there's
: > not a lot I can do with this unit even if I get NetBSD/hpcmips booting
: > on it.
: 
: With 20MB flash in pccard slot, it should be pretty usefull toy...

I have 4MB, 8MB, 32M, 48M and 64M cards.

But 4M of RAM is really small.  The kernel for hpcmips would take up
at least half of that.  This doesn't leave much room for binaries.
Also, the number of dirty pages with shared libraries would leave very
little room for executable code, leading to thrashing, I'd think.

I've often toyed with the idea of memory mapping the CF cards, but I
can't recall if you can do that, or if you are forced to go through
the ATA interface to get to parts of the disk.  A quick flip through
the spec shows that it can map up to 1k of data at a time (two
sectors) which wouldn't help much.  Maybe there's another way to map
the data into the host's address space, but I don't see one.

Warner