Fix make release for 4-STABLE

[John Baldwin]

On Friday 23 January 2004 03:50 pm, Peter Jeremy wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 21, 2004 at 08:41:50AM +0100, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> >John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> >>                                                       [...]  I have this
> >> bad feeling that there is some kind of memory corruption bug in the
> >> loader and that the problem goes away if you use a loader that has forth
> >> in it.
>
> I presume this was the trying-to-DMA-across-a-64k-boundary problem
> that was fixed recently.

Yes.

> >why use a loader w/o forth?  a complete loader with all 4th and conf
> >files takes about 250k, which will definitely fit on the boot floppy,
> >and with splitfs we don't need to worry about there being enough room
> >for the kernel.
>
> "goes away" doesn't mean that the problem isn't there.  It just means
> that there's no obvious problem in John's particular splitfs test case.
> A proper fix is far preferable to masking the problem and finding the
> bug is far easier when it clearly manifests itself.
>
> FORTH in the install loader is an interesting question.  Do the
> benefits of FORTH in the initial install justify its size?  (I don't
> know the answer to this).  I agree that we can do it (with the aid of
> splitfs) but we don't want to unnecessarily bloat the install image.
>
> Firstly, writing and reading floppies is painfully slow, though not
> slow enough that you can usefully do something else whilst waiting.
>
> Secondly, install image bloat translates to a higher minimum RAM
> requirement and the floppy install is likely to be mostly used in
> older systems which are likely to have less RAM.  The last figure I
> can remember is 16MB RAM (it doesn't seem to be documented in the
> -RELEASE Hardware notes).  The current 16MB limit means that it is
> non-trivial to install FreeBSD on any normal 386-based system and
> increasing it further will start biting 486-based systems.  I agree
> that these systems are obsolete but they are still useful as SOHO-
> grade routers, simple firewalls, printservers etc.

The size of the loader doesn't affect how much memory sysinstall needs for the 
install, so adding forth support back in won't affect the minimum memory 
requirement.

-- 
John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>  <><  http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve"  =  http://www.FreeBSD.org