[indiana-discuss] how to install with only 256MB memory?

[Dennis Clarke]

> 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.

 I have tried various pxe-boot incantations as well as booting via CDROM
without much success below the 512MB waterline. I may be doing something
wrong but the x86 miniroot image simply will not fit into available memory.

> On the same 256mb system, I've had /terrible/ trouble trying to get
> Indiana to install, with no luck so far.

Same here. No way no go.

> 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.

good move. It has been a while since I tried that and I feel that is
cheating anyways because someone in the backwoods with an older PC or Laptop
won't have a remote X-terminal anyways.

> 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.

As Alan Hargreaves said "there really is no replacement for real memory".

> 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.
>

I'm beginning to wonder about the value of targetting small systems. Isn't
everything being sold today shipping with 1GB RAM minimal ?

Dennis Clarke