hi all, On Sat, 2007-11-17 at 16:24 -0800, Radim Kolar wrote: > >From my tests, Solaris needs to have at least [b]512 MB[/b] RAM for > installation success even if using old text mode install. This is too > much RAM, because lot of notebooks around me have just 256MB and ppl > would like to try Solaris. > > After installing 256MB is enough for running Solaris, so it would be > nice to have at least text installer (Ubuntu installs in X11 on 256MB > box) to work on 256MB machines.
I've been running an ancient Dell machine with 256mb of ram at home, installed with nv_70b which so far has been working fine. (I've had 36, 57 and 63 on it in the past, iirc). This system has a 160gb zpool on it, and regularly backs up a few gb of data, so zfs & 256mb isn't /too/ bad[1]. Over the weekend, I thought I'd try installing Indiana. The system boots from the livecd into the GNOME desktop eventually but in order to save a bit more ram, I booted into text mode, added a swap slice, and then remote-displayed the installer and started the install. The install got about 21% in, before the install hung. Trying again with kmdb loaded, I saw that the system was under pretty severe memory pressure while doing a cpio of the solaris.zlib file contents, swapping like mad (and when program-text is on cdrom, this is bad ;-) Digging around a bit, I zpool imported the half-completed zpl_slim pool and ftp'd the solaris.zlib file from a remote system directly onto the pool and mounted the .zlib file from there, so I wouldn't be impacted as much by the speed of the cdrom. I then tried again to cpio it's contents, thinking I might be able to manually complete the install, but again, we only got part of the way in before the system started swapping heavily. I initially thought that perhaps the livecd was using up a lot of ram, but reading http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/caiman/slim_prototype/build_live_dvd suggests that the livecd ramdisk is already as small as it can be - is that the case? Given though that the system was pretty responsive under nv_70, I'm trying to work out what's going on - I'm thinking next, I might try extracting to UFS to see if ZFS is the problem, but if anyone has better ideas ? [ this of course, is very low priority, I totally accept that the install engineering team have much better things to be doing than deal with obsolete hardware like mine! ] cheers, tim [1] apparently small memory helps here :-) http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=41474#162180 -- Tim Foster, Sun Microsystems Inc, Solaris Engineering Ops http://blogs.sun.com/timf
