FreeBSD on 64MB memory

[Ian Lepore]

On Tue, 2018-02-13 at 01:04 +0700, Eugene Grosbein wrote:
> 13.02.2018 0:38, Ask Bjørn Hansen wrote:
> 
> > 
> > > 
> > > > 
> > > > I have an old Soekris system with 64MB memory that I upgraded from 10.3 to 11.1 recently. Since then it’s started hanging every few days.
> > > Please show output of commands:
> > > 
> > > grep memory /var/run/dmesg.boot
> > real memory  = 67108864 (64 MB)
> > avail memory = 42098688 (40 MB)
> > 
> > The 24MB are for the kernel?  I wonder my 11.1 kernel is less discriminating with what I compiled in...
> You should be running custom kernel with absolute minimum.
> For example, use "options NO_SWAPPING" to compile out swapping code if your system
> cannot have any swap area.
> 
> > 
> > > 
> > > top -ores -d1
> > Shortly after boot:
> > 
> > last pid:  1008;  load averages:  0.57,  0.62,  0.53    up 0+00:19:31  06:24:50
> > 8 processes:   1 running, 7 sleeping
> > CPU:     % user,     % nice,     % system,     % interrupt,     % idle
> > Mem: 9084K Active, 3644K Inact, 29M Wired, 4862K Buf, 492K Free
> > Swap:
> > 
> >   PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME    WCPU COMMAND
> >   911 root        1  22    0  8816K  8844K select   0:39   4.20% ntpd
> Your Soekris system can live without bloated ntpd, use ntpdate or try sntp
> to periodically check your clock with cron, unless you need to re-distribute
> NTP to your LAN.
> 

Heh.  I think 1) you don't realize you're saying "you don't need ntpd"
to, and 2) you didn't notice the hostname of the system in some of the
debugging output (ntp1.us.grundclock.com).  :)

24MB physmem gone before the kernel even starts seems a little much.  I
wonder if some amount of that is being eaten up by a video frame buffer
that maybe isn't needed on a headless system?

-- Ian