Hannah Schroeter wrote: > Hello! > > On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 02:03:49PM -0400, Jason Crawford wrote: >>There is a note somewhere on the OpenBSD website about installing on >>machines with little ram. Basically, you need to drop to a shell, >>manually enable swap, then go back to the installation process you >>were at, and then have it make the device nodes. > > That's a potentially valid point too. > > My memory on this is: The limit used to be 8MB, and increased to > 12MB later. So the OP's 16 MB computer should be fine unless things > have changed again.
Kinda. The lower limit on i386 was 16M when I started with OpenBSD, then "more than 16M" (20M would do it), but later, swap was turned on before the MAKEDEV step, this eliminated the issue, 12M installs were ALMOST possible, but not quite, as I recall (or maybe I ran out of patience -- those things go into swap hell during install with 12M). When that feature came out in a new release (several releases ago, as I recall), I removed that section from the FAQ. HOWEVER, for this install to work on such a small amount of RAM, you must have swap space. No swap, no 16M installs. The "trick" required swap space, too...so I still don't think there is any reason to dig up that trick..if it isn't working automatically, no idea how it would work better manually. > I haven't tried yet. I haven't tried in a while. Also, and I suspect this may be critical here: every time I have ever probed the "low" side of storage, it has been on 486 class machines or Pentiums which don't support bootable CDs. The CD kernel is larger than the boot floppy kernel, by a non-trivial amount, at least to a 16M machine. More drivers, more utilities, I think (and I'm too lazy to look at the moment). HOWEVER, the "out of RAM" symptom back then was somewhat more subtle -- the machine would just do the "Memory Exhaustion Freeze" thing, where everything running is waiting for some other task to release some RAM so it can continue, it wasn't a segmentation fault. So, either the memory exhaustion symptom has changed (it may have, don't think I tried 16M since 3.6 or 3.5, and haven't tried a swappless system with 16M..well, ever, nor is it high on my priority list), or the CD kernel pushes you into the Next Level of problem with only 16M. Kernel memory can't be swapped, if you ran out there, you are hosed (though I have no idea what happens then). Make sure you have a wd0b swap partition. Get some more RAM. Just a little more -- 32M or even 24M. Try a boot floppy, though if you get the RAM, stick to the CD. Check your hardware. I'm suspicious the tiny amount of RAM could be sending us off on a wild goose chase..though the above two tips are pretty close to critical for starting out. > However, I was able to install a simple bridge box on a 4MB box > through some level of hacking (of course not supported here for > several reasons [custom kernel with small source changes, custom > boot floppy], but worked for me). good disclaimer. 4M. wow. :) Nick.
