[ On Thursday, May 23, 2002 at 17:58:30 (+0200), Julio Merino wrote: ]
> Subject: NetBSD with 4mb ram
>
> I have an old portable 386 computer that only has 4mb of ram. Would it be
> possible to install netbsd on it? 1.5.3 or current? (I've been googling and
> found something about vax, but I do not know if it will be the same on i386).

I have a 486sx laptop with 4MB of RAM that just barely runs.  I can SSH
with it, etc., but it does a fair bit of paging.

It would run a lot more if the main goal wasn't to use an ethernet
interface on it.....   :-)

> Maybe I have to get the disk and perform the install on another computer...

I had to work very hard to get a working INSTALL kernel that would do
TCP/IP with PCMCIA Ethernet.  If you can do the install via some other
machine then the GENERIC_TINY might boot in 4MB.

> this doesn't matter, but will it run afterwards?

You'll probably need a custom kernel if you want networking.  The
variant of GENERIC_TINY I created locally does work, even with wscons,
though there's only about 1.2MB of RAM left for processes, and running
in anything but single-user mode is extremely painful given the very
slow disk in this machine.

$ size /var/NetBSD-obj/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC_TINY/netbsd
text    data    bss     dec     hex     filename
1840275 51244   170572  2062091 1f770b  /var/NetBSD-obj/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC_TINY/netbsd

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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