Memory requirements between releases

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <42FD08D3.2080300 at childeric.freeserve.co.uk>
            Chris <chris at childeric.freeserve.co.uk> writes:
: The installation notes for 5.4 and 6 (the floppies README.TXT) say
: "FreeBSD for the i386 requires ...at least 24 MB of RAM".
: 
: Did the memory requirement really jump that much or is something 
: different being measured?

Not really, if you know what you are doing.

: I have on old tosh 110CT laptop with 24mb memory I want to set up as a 
: wireless router/NAT box but would prefer to use 6 or 5.4. Can I reduce 
: the amount of memory required? I have compiled a reduced kernel but it 
: swaps like mad when compiling.  Kismet and deps took over 12 hours. Just 
: after boot and not doing anything it has about 2mb free and 17 processes 
: running.

You can deploy to one of these laptops, but chances are good that the
extra memory required for large compiles (anything bigger than hello
world) will swap its little brains out.

You can trim the kernel down a lot for the 100CT.  You can eliminate
all the SCSI stuff, all the raid stuff, most of the pci stuff, all the
old crusty ISA ethernet hardware.  You can trim down usb quite a bit,
eliminate eisa.  That helps a lot.  I can boot on my 16MB laptop, but
it is a little painful to do much on.  On that I can elimiante usb and
pci since there's no pci bus at all.  Oh, and firewire too!

Warner