From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
Phone: +49-6637-919123
Fax:   +49-6637-919122
Reply-To: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Message-Id: <199512131707.SAA00867@allegro.lemis.de>
Subject: Re: running in 2 MB...
To: jkh@freefall.freebsd.org (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Wed, 13 Dec 1995 18:07:56 +0100 (MET)
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG (FreeBSD Hackers)
In-Reply-To: <15606.818699917@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at Dec 11, 95 08:38:37 am
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
> 
> > (I could recompile elsewhere, but would like to use the machine for
> > some light-weight work.)
> 
> Light-weight?  Yeah, no kidding!  Like what, exactly?  Running a
> shell, echoing arguments, that kinda thing? :-) :-)

-- Begin war-story mode --

Some years ago, when I worked for Tandem, we shared offices with
Tandem's Frankfurt network node.  This machine ran well without too
much difficulty with minimal memory, since it was mainly concerned
with shuffling data buffers from one line to another.

One day, the network manager came to me and said "we've just installed
the latest and greatest version of Guardian on \NCEURO [the network
machine], and I can't get it to boot.  It just hangs."

I went and had a look, and he was right.  I took a dump and found that
the machine had exactly 3 (three) pages (of 2048 bytes) of memory free
after loading the kernel.  Turned out that that was one too few: the
system monitor (think: init) had paged its code space out before it
had got around to enabling swapping.

-- End war-story mode --

I think there are probably quite a few situations where this little
memory would still work.  I don't think I'd want to use it as an X
workstation, though.

Greg