I had the unpleasant experience last week of installing 1.4.1 on a 
microvax II with 5 megs of memory. it was very slow. it seemed even 
slower than it shoudl have been,. given that with just a shell going and 
whatever started up by default from init, vmstat still reported a (small) 
amount of free memory. I scavenged some more memory and it runs much better
with 13 megs. I was somewhat disappointed, since 1.4.1 was supposed to 
have been faster than the later releases, too. 
isildur

On Mon, 27 May 2002, John Klos wrote:

> Back to something relevant, will NetBSD now or in the future be runnable
> on systems with 4 megs of memory?
> 
> The last I've tried, I can only reasonably run NetBSD on m68k systems with
> 6 megs. Although I did get a 4 meg system to boot, waiting literally hours
> for the system to complete the startup sequence was not what I'd consider
> usable.
> 
> Will we see trimmed down NetBSD binary sets, optimised for low memory
> systems, or will we eventually decide that 8 megs is the practical
> minimum?
> 
> (Note that this question is rhetorical; I know for a fact that just as
> soon as someone says, "we will no longer wish to care about systems with
> less than 8 megs", a number of people will come up with kernel config
> files to show exactly how to set up a 4 meg NetBSD system).
> 
> Is anyone keeping track of system memory use of each GENERIC from, say,
> 1.4 and up? What's the best way to measure?
> 
> John
> 
>