Re: 2.5 and lowmemory boxens

[jbradford@dial.pipex.com]

>    first: i`ve successfully ran 2.5.43 on a 386sx20/4M ram notebook.

Cool, I thought my 486sx20/4M was a good achievement :-)

>  the one problem was the ppp over serial not working, but i suspect
>  that it just needs to be recompiled with 2.5 headers (am i right?).

I have found that 16450-based serial ports are unreliable under
2.5.x.  Enabling interrupt un-masking didn't help, and I suspect that
it is just the generally more bloated kernel making the cache, (or in
the case of a 386, the pre-fetch unit :-) ), less efficient, and
causing data to be lost.

>  the other was, well, the fact that ultra-stripped 2.5.43
>  still used 200k more memory than 2.4.19, and thats despite it was
>  compiled with -Os instead of -O2.
>  actually it was 2000k free with 2.4 vs 1800k  free with 2.5

Yes, I've noticed the same thing during my experiments with low-memory boxes.

>  i know Rik had plans of some ultra bloody embedded/lowmem
>  changes for such cases. i`d like to hear about things in the area :)

I am also very interested in it.

John.