On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Manuel Bouyer wrote:

> Date: Sat, 5 Oct 2002 15:42:36 +0200
> From: Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
> To: Steven M. Bellovin <smb@research.att.com>
> Cc: Carrie Jones <carrie@cjones.org>, Aaron J. Grier <agrier@poofygoof.com>,
>      port-i386@netbsd.org
> Subject: Re: trouble booting from tiny installation.
>
> On Fri, Oct 04, 2002 at 04:17:51PM -0400, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> > In message <Pine.NEB.4.44.0210041349310.2573-100000@maxine.cjones.org>, Carrie
> > Jones writes:
> > >many thanks also to Brian Stark and Manuel Bouyer who helped. Now it
> > >begins booting and seems to be going along fine until it gets to here:
> > >
> > >(** means kernel output)
> > >
> > >**root file system type: ffs
> > >Fri Oct  4 19:44:05 GMT 2002
> > >**UVM: pid 10 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >Killed
> > >**UVM: pid 13 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >Killed
> > >Starting File system checks:
> > >**UVM: pid 15 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >Killed
> > >Unknown error:help!
> > >**UVM: pid 14 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >Killed
> > >**UVM: pid 6 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >**UVM: pid 16 (sh), uid 0 killed: out of swap
> > >Oct  4 19:44:37 init:/bin/sh on /etc/rc terminiated abnormally, going
> > >to single user mode
> > >
> > >And then it hangs.  This is a ten finger copy, so please
> > >excuse my fumble fingers. Any ideas?
> >
> >
> > It means just what it says -- there's not enough swap space.  And I
> > assume you have little RAM, so it does need to swap.
> >
> > The best answer is to repartition the disk, which would mean starting
> > your installation over again...  If you don't want to do that, you can
> > *probably* create a large file (say, /usr/SWAP), mode 600, and add it
> > to /etc/fstab as a swap device.  If you do that, you should be ok,
> > assuming that you have enough swap area to get that far.  Swapping to
> > files is enabled comparatively late in the boot process, and if you're
> > having problems on pid 10 I don't know if you're getting that far.
> > You can work around that, but it may take some playing with rc.d
> > scripts.
>
> I suspect it's dying even before it got any chance to run swapon.
> Probably the installed kernel is too large.
> What machine is it, how much memory does it have, and what kernel set
> did you install ?
>
> --
> Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
> --

Actually you are correct, it is dying before running swapon. I installed
the boot tiny on to a 486 with 8mgs of memory. I had 1.4.3 installed and
working fine, but it's eol'ed and I need to upgrade ssh, (what with all
the recent security holes,) and ssh wouldn't upgrade on my 1.4
installation.

I suppose the best solution would be to start looking for a larger memory
chip, but the dang thing is a packard-bell with one expansion slot, that
requires a particular type of memory, so I'd have to find a very large
memory chip and rip the 4 mgs out that are there and replace it, and I
just know that kind of memory is not particularly cheap. Sigh. (I bought
it back in 93 before I really knew anything about computers.)

Any other avenues I can explore?

-Carrie