Subject: Re: MobilePro 400
To: Warner Losh <imp@harmony.village.org>
From: Pavel Machek <pavel@suse.cz>
List: port-hpcmips
Date: 03/02/2001 23:24:26
Hi!
> : > OK. I have this pipe-dream of running NetBSD on my MobilePro 400. I
> : > just purchased a replacement screen for the broken one that I have had
> : > for ages.
> : >
> : > I see two problems. One, the keyboard interface for these things is
> : > unknown (right?). Two, with 4MB of RAM, that's a very tight amount of
> : > memory. There's a serial port and a single pccard slot, so there's
> : > not a lot I can do with this unit even if I get NetBSD/hpcmips booting
> : > on it.
> :
> : With 20MB flash in pccard slot, it should be pretty usefull toy...
>
> I have 4MB, 8MB, 32M, 48M and 64M cards.
>
> But 4M of RAM is really small. The kernel for hpcmips would take up
> at least half of that. This doesn't leave much room for binaries.
> Also, the number of dirty pages with shared libraries would leave very
> little room for executable code, leading to thrashing, I'd think.
Yes, 4MB is tight, but I remember running i386 linux in that ammount
(with normal distribution). [It involved heavy swapping however]. If
you can swap onto flash (will not that kill flash too fast?), it
should be workable.
> I've often toyed with the idea of memory mapping the CF cards, but I
> can't recall if you can do that, or if you are forced to go through
> the ATA interface to get to parts of the disk. A quick flip through
> the spec shows that it can map up to 1k of data at a time (two
> sectors) which wouldn't help much. Maybe there's another way to map
> the data into the host's address space, but I don't see one.
Most flashes are ATA-flashes and I believe you need to use IDE for
them. There are some obscure flashes without ATA interface.
--
The best software in life is free (not shareware)! Pavel
GCM d? s-: !g p?:+ au- a--@ w+ v- C++@ UL+++ L++ N++ E++ W--- M- Y- R+