i386 minimum space requirements

[John Klos]

Hi,

The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 32MB of
RAM and 250MB of disk space.

Some rough amounts:

base, comp, etc, games, kern-GENERIC, man, misc, modules, rescue, text: 629 megs
With tests: 678 megs
With xbase, xcomp, xetc, xfont, xserver: 929 megs
With debug and xdebug: 2832 megs

I don't think 250 megs of disk space is going to cut it any longer :)

John

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[David Brownlee]

Post by John Klos
Hi,

The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 32MB of
RAM and 250MB of disk space.

base, comp, etc, games, kern-GENERIC, man, misc, modules, rescue, text: 629 megs
With tests: 678 megs
With xbase, xcomp, xetc, xfont, xserver: 929 megs
With debug and xdebug: 2832 megs
I don't think 250 megs of disk space is going to cut it any longer :)

Definitely a good idea to update!

So ~1G with X, and ~700M without. Would you be able to run a quick
test with just base, kern-GENERIC & etc to get an absolute minimum?
(More likely to be of interest to 32bit x86 retro dabblers :)

David

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[John Klos]

Post by David Brownlee

Post by John Klos
base, comp, etc, games, kern-GENERIC, man, misc, modules, rescue, text: 629 megs
With tests: 678 megs
With xbase, xcomp, xetc, xfont, xserver: 929 megs
With debug and xdebug: 2832 megs
I don't think 250 megs of disk space is going to cut it any longer :)

Definitely a good idea to update!
So ~1G with X, and ~700M without. Would you be able to run a quick
test with just base, kern-GENERIC & etc to get an absolute minimum?
(More likely to be of interest to 32bit x86 retro dabblers :)

Certainly. It's 186 megs (as reported with du -sm).

This reminds me that I want to see if I can figure out why NetBSD's
bootblocks won't work on a TI 486DLC. Luckily, I have more than a gigabyte
of disk for it.

Thanks!
John

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[David Brownlee]

Post by John Klos

Post by David Brownlee

Post by John Klos
base, comp, etc, games, kern-GENERIC, man, misc, modules, rescue, text: 629 megs
With tests: 678 megs
With xbase, xcomp, xetc, xfont, xserver: 929 megs
With debug and xdebug: 2832 megs
I don't think 250 megs of disk space is going to cut it any longer :)

Definitely a good idea to update!
So ~1G with X, and ~700M without. Would you be able to run a quick
test with just base, kern-GENERIC & etc to get an absolute minimum?
(More likely to be of interest to 32bit x86 retro dabblers :)

Certainly. It's 186 megs (as reported with du -sm).

OK, so the notes should probably be updated

Huh, looks like distrib/notes/i386/hardware on current and -10 has:

| runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32 processors.
| The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 64MB of RAM
| and 2GB of disk space.

Do you have that 250MB from somewhere else?

It may be worth adjusting to note that a base-only could be installed
in 32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space, but would not be performant
:-p

David

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[John Klos]

Post by David Brownlee
| runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32 processors.
| The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 64MB of RAM
| and 2GB of disk space.
Do you have that 250MB from somewhere else?

It's from here:

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.3/i386/INSTALL.html

NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices

NetBSD 9.3 runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32
processors. The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is
32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space.

Post by David Brownlee
It may be worth adjusting to note that a base-only could be installed
in 32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space, but would not be performant
:-p

Considering how well NetBSD 10 runs on my Mac LC III+ with 36 megs of
memory and on my VAXstation 4000/30 (also known as VLC) with 24 megs, I
think 32 megs on even a slow clocked i486 should be pretty decent ;)

John

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[Martin Husemann]

Post by John Klos
NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices
NetBSD 9.3 runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32
processors. The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is
32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space.

This is also encoded in usr.sbin/sysinst/arch/i386/md.h:

/* Megs required for a full X installation. */
#define XNEEDMB 250

#define DEBNEEDMB 1024 /* Extra megs for debug sets */


and the X size probably comes from an older version of X11 (and especially
before the DRM drivers).

We should update it, and also verify all other architectures, I guess amd64
and evbarm have their numbers off too.

Martin

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[Alexander Schreiber]

Post by Martin Husemann

Post by John Klos
NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices
NetBSD 9.3 runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32
processors. The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is
32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space.

/* Megs required for a full X installation. */
#define XNEEDMB 250
#define DEBNEEDMB 1024 /* Extra megs for debug sets */
and the X size probably comes from an older version of X11 (and especially
before the DRM drivers).
We should update it, and also verify all other architectures, I guess amd64
and evbarm have their numbers off too.

I just installed a new i386 class machine (Alix: 500 MHz Geode,
256M RAM) with NetBSD 9.3 with what I consider a minimum system,
which is the following sets:
- Kernel
- kernel modules
- Base
- Configuration files
- Compiler tools
- Manual pages
- Miscellaneous
- Recovery tools
- Text processing tools

Freshly after install, this comes to 628M used on the rootfs (just a
single rootfs, no separation for e.g. /usr, /var, ...).

I left out X11 and sources, since this machine only has a serial
console and I'll grab sources when 10.0 is released.

Kind regards,
Alex.

[Alexander Schreiber]

Post by John Klos

Post by David Brownlee
| runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32 processors.
| The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is 64MB of RAM
| and 2GB of disk space.
Do you have that 250MB from somewhere else?

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.3/i386/INSTALL.html
NetBSD/i386 System Requirements and Supported Devices
NetBSD 9.3 runs on all i486 or later PC-compatible systems with 1 to 32
processors. The minimal configuration for a full, standard installation is
32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space.

Post by David Brownlee
It may be worth adjusting to note that a base-only could be installed
in 32MB of RAM and 250MB of disk space, but would not be performant
:-p

Considering how well NetBSD 10 runs on my Mac LC III+ with 36 megs of memory
and on my VAXstation 4000/30 (also known as VLC) with 24 megs, I think 32
megs on even a slow clocked i486 should be pretty decent ;)

Depends on what you do with the machine. I'm running NetBSD/i386 9.3
on an Alix (500 MHz AMD Geode, 256M RAM) and top currently says:
105M active. This machine is a dedicated isolation router for a
commercial VoIP phone and it also runs node_exporter (10M resident
alone), darkstat and a bunch of other support tooling. No swap since
the root disk is a CF card. It would _not_ be happy with 32M of RAM.

And disk use: about 4 GB - but that includes a full system source tree,
as the machine was installed with 8.0 and source upgraded via 9.0, 9.1
and now to 9.3.

Kind regards,
Alex.