Re: Install DragonFlyBSD on 48 MB RAM

[v_2e@xxxxxxx]

  Hello!

On Fri, 2 Mar 2012 01:22:38 +0100
Thomas Nikolajsen <thomas.nikolajsen@mail.dk> wrote:
> 
> 48MB is a rather low mem system, so you might not be able to run the
> installer, but you can do manual install of DragonFly, that way you
> will also learn the steps, see /README on install media; please use
> UFS; not HAMMER, it needs more mem.
> (http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/blob/HEAD:/nrelease/root/README)
> 
  Yes, thank you. I have DragonFlyBSD "up and running" for a couple of
days already on my machine with 32 MB of RAM.
I proceeded with manual install - almost exactly as the 'README' says.
Since it was a 'clean' installation - using a dedicated HDD, I
experienced no problems with it. 
And by the way, after the installation I managed to start 'installer'
from the installation CD to do the basic system tuning (e.g. network
setup, keyboard map, hostname etc.), but it required some
not-so-trivial actions, because it does not start as expected when one
simply tries to run 'installer' in the single-user shell (which is what
I used to boot form CD). I searched over the Internet and finally got
to this file:
http://cvsweb.dragonflybsd.org/cvsweb/src/nrelease/installer/usr/local/bin/installer?rev=1.5&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup
  I found the optional commands there and did:

    # /usr/sbin/dfuibe_installer -r "installer" -t npipe >/dev/null &
    # /usr/sbin/dfuife_curses -r "installer" -t npipe

After this the installer started (with some 'debug' output on the
screen, but it does not interferes much) and I still had an ability to
type in all the necessary settings.

  The only problem I met after that was that the installed system
stopped booting after I had configured the network interfaces. It
turned out that if the network interface was configured
in /etc/rc.conf, the swap partition was turned on after the network
scripts, and it caused everything down. So I made a slight change in the
    /etc/rc.d/swap1
startup script:
    - # BEFORE:  SERVERS
    + # BEFORE: NETWORKING
After that my new system booted properly into multi-user mode and now I
can connect via SSH to it and more or less do what I want. :)

Still I'm not sure I did everything right (it could be just a
coincidence that my system booted properly after my changes, after
all). It would be very good if somebody could clarify it to me.

As for the DMA memory allocation:

On Thu, 1 Mar 2012 17:45:36 -0800 (PST)
Matthew Dillon <dillon@apollo.backplane.com> wrote:
> 
>    It should be reserving less space on low-memory machines.
> 
>         if (vm_dma_reserved == 0) {
>                 vm_dma_reserved = 16 * 1024 * 1024;     /* 16MB */
>                 if (vm_dma_reserved > total / 16)
>                         vm_dma_reserved = total / 16;
>         }
> 
I didn't play with it, since I did not (an DO not, actually) understand
it to any sufficient amount. Bluntly speaking, I do not now HOW, WHERE
and TO WHAT AMOUNT to change. Of course, I would appreciate if somebody
could point me to the corresponding place in the documentation or to
some kind of article on this subject.

  Thanks!

P.S. After the installation I ran 'make pkgsrc-create' like
DragonFlyBSD online documentation suggests, and it has been running for
about 2 days already. :D
I can see a program with a command line:
    git index-pack --stdin -v --fix-thin --keep=fetch-pack 782 on Hippy
--pack_header=2,1682778
consuming about 137 MB of memory, so it looks like it really dived deep
into swap. :)
  Any advices on that?

  Regards,
    Vladimir

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