Re: 2mb functionality?

On Tue, 13 Aug 2002, james taylor wrote:

> I have recently acquired an Acorn 4000, with the hope of running
> NetBSD/acorn26. Having downloaded the latest snapshot, putting it onto a
> disk with the bootloader and running it on the machine, i get a 'page is
> used error'. It is usually preceded by a number which varies from 49 to
> around 53.
>
> Is this caused by the fact that I only have 2mb of ram, or is it a
> hardware fault.

It's almost certainly caused by the shortage of memory.  NetBSD won't run
on a 2 MB machine at all, since it doesn't have support for different page
sizes.

> I noted that your 4 megabyte kernel version had 'but tend to run out of
> memory too easily to be of any use' listed near it. Are you talking
> about a hefty application like X, or just general everyday commands.

I'm talking about just getting a login prompt.  I believe Gavan Fantom has
managed to get that far with a lot of work (and a rather more minimal
kernel than mine), but I don't think he's committed the changes.

> I'd like to use the machine as a NAT Gateway, but would the overhead NAT
> produces surpass the capabilities of the Acorn 4000?

You might be able to achieve this with a cut-down kernel and a custom
/etc/rc that doesn't do much more than starting up NAT.  The NAT itself
happens in the kernel, so it shouldn't be terribly memory-hungry.  I was
planning to do something like this with one of my A3020s, but then I went
and bought a net4501.

-- 
Ben Harris                                                   <[email protected]>
Portmaster, NetBSD/acorn26           <URL:http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/acorn26/>