Re: Old Binary Packages/Sources (NetBSD/i386 1.5.3)?

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 08:30:38AM +0000, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> > > Apparently NetBSD RAM and CPU
> > > requirements increased sharply between 4.0.1 and 5.0.
> 
> > Is this documented somewhere?  I'd not heard that before.
> 
> > Tim
> 
> I see in INSTALL.html that, for NetBSD i386, from NetBSD 4.0.1 to 5.0,
> minimum CPU went from 386 to 486, and minimum RAM went from 4 MB to
> 32 MB, though you could do a manual custom install of 5.0 with < 32 MB.

The bump from 386 to 486 reflected the reality that a lot of the 386 is
untested and was expected to be buggy. The other major issue with 386 is
the lack of cmpxchg.

The bumping of the minimum memory requirement was IIRC mostly a
reflection of reality as well. NetBSD 5.0 doesn't require 8 times the
amount of memory as 4.0 did, it is more like you already wanted more
than 16MB for anything useful in the 4.0 age too.

Joerg