Re: Install DragonFlyBSD on 48 MB RAM

[Thomas Nikolajsen <thomas.nikolajsen@xxxxxxx>]

>I have DragonFlyBSD "up and running" for a couple of
>days already on my machine with 32 MB of RAM.

>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).

Our installer isn't a small program, it isn't supposed to work on small mem systems.
Please do setup youself (installer capabilities are quite basic anyway),
please read rc.conf.5: 'man rc.conf, or
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/cgi/web-man?command=rc.conf&section=ANY .
This has links to other commands / setup files; our handbook also has info on this.
This way you will also learn much more :)

>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?

This will use git(1) to checkout (fetch) pkgsrc files for building packages yourself.
git(1) is not a small program, it can use quite a bit of memory,
so it is not expected to work on a small mem system, 128MB is absolutely minimum;
256MB recommended (as noted earlier in this thread).

Anyway building non trivial programs isn't possible on a low mem system
(if you can run gcc(1) at all), so likely you will not have much use for what
'make pkgsrc-create' fetches; if you like it anyway just fetch the files in tar format,
as suggested in this thread.

Please use pkg_radd(1) to install precompiled packages.

To sum up: small mem system isn't applicable to do any development,
just to run small programs compiled on other (normal mem) systems.

Current DragonFly release, 3.0, boots on 48MB, maybe 32MB, but it isn't
guaranteed to work on such small mem on next release.
256MB is minimum we guarantee to work, to be able to focus on new features
working on normal mem systems, like 1GB and up.
For many features 4GB is recommended, to have plenty of buffer space
to get things going smoothly.

 -thomas