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.

Yes, 4MB is tight, but I remember running i386 linux in that ammount
(with normal distribution). [It involved heavy swapping however]. If
you can swap onto flash (will not that kill flash too fast?), it
should be workable.

> 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.

Most flashes are ATA-flashes and I believe you need to use IDE for
them. There are some obscure flashes without ATA interface. 

-- 
The best software in life is free (not shareware)!		Pavel
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