In message <20010302232426.B10556@atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz> 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.
: 
: 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.

Swapping to flash is a bad idea.  You'll wear them out too quickly.

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

Right.  I have a few 4MB Linear flash cards, which can be directly
mapped into memory at the bridge level iirc (don't have the docs
handy).  I've seen the linear flash cards as large as 32M.  They are
hard to program and some laptops cannot program them (I think that the
MobilePro doesn't have the +12V needed for Vpp to program them with).
That might be an alternative, but these cards are getting hard to find
and are generally small or expensive.  (on ebay right now, there are
only 4MB cards).

One might also want to consider SRAM cards, but these are expensive as
well and I've not seen more than 2MB for a SRAM card.

Warner