Ram requirements..

Ram requirements..

[Digby]

Can anyone give any insights into minimum memory requirments for
running the Intel version of Plan 9? 

I recently tried installing it on an old toshiba laptop with 4Mb
of ram, and the installation processed failed when trying to decompress
and copy the floppy system onto the hard disk.

I was previously using the machine for Unix/X and Windows 3.1, which while
not fast, was quite usable. I find it very hard to believe that Plan 9 is
less efficient in memory use than these two...

Is this purely a limitation of the installation process, and if so can
anyone suggest a workaround? 

Thanks,
DigbyT

Ram requirements..

[Boyd]

    From: Digby Tarvin <digbyt@acm.org>

    I recently tried installing it on an old toshiba laptop with 4Mb
    of ram, and the installation processed failed when trying to decompress
    and copy the floppy system onto the hard disk.

i had this problem once too.  i looked at the script that does the
installation and serialised it using temporary files, rather than a
pipeline.  it was a bit ugly, but it did work.

Ram requirements..

[presotto]

vdexpand has a memory/speed trade off that we weighted in terms
of memory.  Unfortunately it has to match the memory used in the
compression.  If someone wants to hand out a differently compressed
version of our diskettes, I certainly won't complain.

Ram requirements..

[Eric]

> From digbyt@acm.org Tue May 20 10:20:53 1997
> X-Authentication-Warning: claven.cse.psu.edu: majordom set sender to owner-9fans using -f

> Can anyone give any insights into minimum memory requirments for
> running the Intel version of Plan 9? 
> 
> I recently tried installing it on an old toshiba laptop with 4Mb
> of ram, and the installation processed failed when trying to decompress
> and copy the floppy system onto the hard disk.

I hvae been able to install the pcdist on a machine with 5Mb, so
4Mb is not too far away from working.  Changing the kernelpercent
param in plan9.ini (as suggested by bischof@informatik..) after 
installing the first floppy and before installing the 3floppysystem
might get you under the wire.

Since there doesn't seem to be source for vdsqueeze anywhere in
the CDROM tree (nor a binary for that matter) I rebuilt my installation
pcdist with gzip/gunzip so I can floppyinstall machines with all
the patches.  I've installed the pcdist on several machines
that way, but have never tried a machine with so little ram.  It might
be that vdexpand uses more memory than gunzip (err, gzip -d); I haven't
tried the old 5Mb machine using the gzipped pcdist floppies though.
I'll try that tonight.

> I was previously using the machine for Unix/X and Windows 3.1, which while
> not fast, was quite usable. I find it very hard to believe that Plan 9 is
> less efficient in memory use than these two...

Someone just has to sit down and make it work.  It should be possible
to make, for example, kernelpercent, a floating parameter rather
than a hardcoded limit.

>Thanks,
>DigbyT

Regards,

Eric Dorman
Department of Radiology
University of California at San Diego
edorman@tanya.ucsd.edu

Ram requirements..

[Hans-Peter]

Extract from http://www.ecf.toronto.edu/plan9/plan9faq.html

_The official answer is no, 8Mb is the minimum supported memory configuration. Some people are  
using it with only 4Mb though.

You'll need to borrow 4Mb from another system to get you past the install process (where 8Mb is  
needed to expand the diskettes). After the install is done, you may be able to run with only 4Mb if  
you set the vga at a low resolution and/or depth, or perhaps fiddle with the kernelpercent  
parameter in plan9.ini(8).


-hp