Julian Elischer wrote: > Markus Boelter wrote: > > > > > Apart from wondering how you're getting the motherboard to get past > > > POST without RAM, I'm wondering how you'd get the bootloader and > > > > > [...] > > > > The guys at Linux/OpenBIOS did some Cache-as-RAM stuff. Maybe you can > > also put (burn) the kernel directly into the BIOS chip and bott with > > that kernel. This is just an idea out of my head - nothing tested and no > > research done in this field. :-) > > A modern CPU with 4Mb of cache and no ram has more ram than my first system. > If you wanted to you might be able to get FreeBSD 1.1 up in such an > environment.
I had FreeBSD 2.2-stable installed on an old notebook with 4 MB RAM (actually less, because ~ 0.5 MB was lost VGA mappings and registers etc.). It was very usable for simple things like text editing and as a terminal. > (Just no DMA capability, so no floppies). You can access the FDC in PIO mode, no DMA necessary. It won't be very efficient, but a floppy drive is slow anyway. You'll have to access the hard disk in PIO mode, too, so that will also be slow. You'll probably want to avoid swapping / paging at all. That means that your whole working set has to fit in 4 MB (minus what the kernel needs). That'll probably be difficult, depending on what you're planning to use the machine for. Bottom line: I think it's useless. :-) It makes more sense to eliminate the hard disk instead of the RAM. And running diskless is perfectly possible (and quite easy) with FreeBSD; I've done such setups in the past. Best regards Oliver -- Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing b. M. Handelsregister: Registergericht Muenchen, HRA 74606, Geschäftsfuehrung: secnetix Verwaltungsgesellsch. mbH, Handelsregister: Registergericht Mün- chen, HRB 125758, Geschäftsführer: Maik Bachmann, Olaf Erb, Ralf Gebhart FreeBSD-Dienstleistungen, -Produkte und mehr: http://www.secnetix.de/bsd "If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution." -- Robert Sewell _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
