Hi all, I've booted and installed nv_70 on a 256mb system with about 512mb of swap and it worked fine. I'm told these days that ttinstall needs 384mb, (as of nv_73, was it?) but haven't tried this myself.
On the same 256mb system, I've had /terrible/ trouble trying to get Indiana to install, with no luck so far. I was remotely displaying the installer gui (so I didn't have to run X locally) and I was able to kick off the install. I found that the machine gets about 200mb into copying the large cpio archive onto the zpool before the machine starts swapping heavily, I've even left it overnight on a few occasions, to no avail. I then started trying to tune the system a little bit, reducing the number of zio threads, which actually helped a bit believe it or not - I got 400mb of data from the cpio file before the machine started thrashing about. Limiting the arc doesn't help, because the tuning code only accepts "sane" values, 64mb and upwards - at the machine's busiest during the install, I observed the arc only using about 18mb. I was in touch with Roch from PAE to see if there was other ways to limit ZFS's memory usage, but the zfs code changes he sent me which I compiled didn't seem to limit things very much on such a small system, some slight improvements, but nothing radical. >From chatting to Moinak earlier on this list, it sounds like the real problem is the size of the ramdisk - 150mb of ramdisk is a big ask on a small machine. I haven't got much further into working out whether this can be trimmed substantially, but I did watch a different system doing an Indiana install using Brendan Gregg's execsnoop. This is at http://blogs.sun.com/timf/resource/indiana-install-execsnoop.txt My intent was to eventually boot the system with a stripped-down miniroot, and duplicate the steps I captured in the execsnoop output above. I haven't had enough ample-free-time to investigate further unfortunately (got as far as building my own CD using the distro constructor, but hadn't started to pick apart the slim_install and slim_cd packages to see what could be left out) Hopefully the execsnoop output might help someone who has more time though? cheers, tim -- Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops http://blogs.sun.com/timf _______________________________________________ indiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/indiana-discuss
