On Tue, 26 Mar 2002, Rick Kelly wrote:

> The downside of the Sun 3/50 is the memory hole between the onboard
> 4 megs and the 8 meg third-party card. Also, the cycle stealing video
> doesn't help either. I could probably get a little improvement by
> using a serial console.
>
	A little, but its not going to set the world alight :)

> >	I agree the base system is getting larger - IPv6 was a large chunk
> >	in itself - and a GENERIC kernel is no longer bootable for many
> >	smaller machines, but if people are willing to spend the time to
> >	help better conditionalise the kernel it can benefit everyone.
>
> You can't actually boot a GENERIC kernel on a Sun 3/50. :-)
>
> You can even see the INSTALL kernel leaking into video memory. The kernel
> that I'm using now is:
>
> -rwxr-xr-x   1 root  wheel  819494 Mar 13 09:34 netbsd
>
> I could make it even smaller.

	Because of the specific hardware limitations we should probably
	have {GENERIC,INSTALL}_3_50 configurations.

> >	An obvious place to start would be to compile up a custom kernel,
> >	run size on *.o in the compile directory, and work out where a
> >	bunch os space is being used. Alternatively look at shrinking
> >	some of the hash tables and similar used in the kernel.
>
> I have maxusers set to 2, and a look at "sysctl -a" shows that resources
> are set pretty low.
>
	There are various hashes used in the networking and filesystems
	which could probably be better tuned for minimal memory machines,
	or in some cases conditionally eliminated.

> I am going to plug the disks into a 3/60 with 24megs and a 3/110 with
> 12megs, to see if there are any performance differences. At one time I
> was using a 3/60 running NetBSD 1.2 to run a low impact webserver.

	I would certainly expect to see the 3/60 outperform the 3/50
	even with the same amount of RAM. Whether it will be
	noticible on your workload.... Going to use thttpd? :)

> I also have a Sun 3/80 that needs a power supply that I want to get up and
> running. I have another 3/80 running SunOS 4.1.1.

	Bugger, I just ditched a dead ss2 which would probably have had a
	matching PSU.

-- 
		David/absolute		-- www.netbsd.org: No hype required --