Proof of concept box with 8mB RAM
Nikolas Britton
nikolas.britton at gmail.com
Sun Aug 27 23:01:24 UTC 2006
On 8/27/06, hackmiester (Hunter Fuller) <hackmiester at hackmiester.com> wrote:
> Everyone will laugh at this, but I have an old box with a 25mHz
> processor or so. It has 8mB of memory. I want to install some type of
> UNIX clone on it, as a proof of concept. I don't care if it's linux,
> freebsd, or something else, but I need something that will run with
> enough speed to run an sshd and not much else. It will just be to
> prove that old hardware can still be used. Any suggestions?
> _______________________________________________
That box doesn't have enough memory to run a current version of
FreeBSD or Linux. Also what CPU does it use? FreeBSD 6.x, and I'm sure
Linux 2.6, removed 386 support. You need a 486 or better to run the
current version of FreeBSD. Does this box have a math coprocessor?
The "recommended" minimum requirements to run FreeBSD 6.1 is a Pentium
MMX, or equivalent, with 32MB of system ram. You can get by with less
but you won't like the results if you plan to use it as a workstation.
Use FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE or 5.5-STABLE for anything less then that.
I did some tests on disk space and memory requirements back in January
with FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. Nobody seemed to notice the first time so
I'll post it again:
Test Rig:
VMware 5 (Win2K/NTFS), VM Settings:
32MB RAM
64MB RAM For KDE-Lite Install (failed with 32MB)
128MB RAM For GNOME-Lite Install (failed with 64MB)
4GB Hard Drive (Default settings)
CD-ROM (Pointing to FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE i386 ISO Images)
No USB, No Audio, No LAN
FreeBSD Disk Layout:
ad0s1a 4095MB / ufs2
ad0s1b null swap null
ad0s1d null /var null
ad0s1e null /tmp null
ad0s1f null /usr null
Everything (/tmp, /var, and /usr) is setup on the root partition, no
swap partition was setup.
Results:
* 1st column of numbers are from the VM disk image file.
* 2nd column is from inside FreeBSD with "du -m".
* All numbers reported in megabytes.
Distribution Sets:
Developer 918 741
X-Developer 1080 882
Kern-Developer 526 427
X-Kern-Developer 690 568
User 393 319
X-User 560 461
Minimal 183 156
Extrapolated Results:
Ports System 283 270
GNOME-Lite 688 655
KDE-Lite 879 864
X.Org Default Install 164 143
X.Org Full Install 177 158
Linux Binary Compat. 255 127
Sys Sources + Proflibs 392 315
Kern Sources + Proflibs 133 109
Miscellaneous Sets:
X-User (All X.Org) 572 476
X-User + GNOME-Lite 1247 1115
X-User + KDE-Lite 1438 1323
Minimal + Ports System 466 425
Minimal + Linux Compat. 438 282
--
BSD Podcasts @:
http://bsdtalk.blogspot.com/
http://freebsdforall.blogspot.com/
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list