Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Now that we have a semi-working (apart from screen and keyboard and 
battery) 386 laptop with 4.7MB RAM (of which 2.3 is taken up by kernel and 
other essential processes unless I remove one virtual terminal) I am 
wondering how much smaller the BL3 kernel could be compiled for 3MB 
systems so that they would have more than 700K to work in.

I looked at the configuration for the generic BL3 kernel and there are 
several things in there not applicable to 386 and older 486 laptops:

Module support:
CD-ROM and maybe iso9660_fs.
PCMCIA (found in our newest 486 laptop with 12MB RAM, reg. kernel okay)
Ethernet (cannot add cards)

PCI support:  Do older 486 laptops have PCI?

I don't know what half of the other stuff is, but if the above were left 
out, how much RAM would it save, and would it take up less RAM to include 
the network, serial and parallel port module stuff in the kernel instead 
of making them loadable (parport, parport_pc, ppp, slhc, plip, slip)? 
Probably not.

Are NFS SUNRPC and LOCKD something useful in a 386 laptop?
What is SYSVIPC and SYSCTL?

BL3 even with X runs fine in 4MB on a fast computer, but 3MB even on a 
fast computer is awful, so an extra few hundred K would help a lot.

Steven, if leaving out those few things and anything else not applicable 
to a 386 or older 486 laptop would save much RAM, would you be interested 
in compiling a 386-lowram kernel?

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org