On Fri, Mar 27, 2026 at 7:54 AM Julian Coleman <jdc%coris.org.uk@localhost> wrote: [...] > and so on, i.e. removing anything that isn't present on SUN4 or SUN4C. So I spent some time making such configs and found that the problem is much worse than I thought. After putting 1MB SIMMs on my 4300 CPU board I discovered it also has the kernel file size limit that sun4c has, that is 4MB in RAM or ~3.3MB on disk. I made some configs (attached below) that come in around 20KB under the limit but I had to cut out most stuff to get that low. While these kernels are bootable on the hardware that is just the start of problems. The RC scripts are too heavy to run on a system with only 4MB of free memory and what's worse is they treat swap as an afterthought when it needs to be the number one priority. You have to boot into single user and run swapctl -A first before continuing with a multiuser boot. Then I ran into the final problem which is a show stopper. On an SS1 w/ 8MB of RAM that I net booted with nfs swap the login program runs so slowly that it times out after 300s before you can login making the system unusable. Not sure how practical it is to try and support this minimum config, a lot of SUN4 & SUN4C systems shipped with 16MB so that might be a better target. Note the SUN4 config has cgfour and cgsix enabled but both need bug fixes to work. Will send another email with a patch for cgfour.
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