From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S263068AbTJOND1 (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:03:27 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S263109AbTJOND1 (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:03:27 -0400 Received: from holomorphy.com ([66.224.33.161]:11157 "EHLO holomorphy") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S263068AbTJOND0 (ORCPT ); Wed, 15 Oct 2003 09:03:26 -0400 Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 06:06:14 -0700 From: William Lee Irwin III To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: jbglaw@lug-owl.de Subject: Re: Unbloating the kernel, was: :mem=16MB laptop testing Message-ID: <20031015130614.GI765@holomorphy.com> Mail-Followup-To: William Lee Irwin III , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jbglaw@lug-owl.de References: <200310141733.h9EHXnYg002262@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk> <20031015124314.GD20846@lug-owl.de> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20031015124314.GD20846@lug-owl.de> Organization: The Domain of Holomorphy User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 2003-10-14 18:33:49 +0100, John Bradford > wrote in message <200310141733.h9EHXnYg002262@81-2-122-30.bradfords.org.uk>: >> No, 2.6 should run on a 4MB 386 with no significant performance >> penalty against 2.0, in my opinion. On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 02:43:14PM +0200, Jan-Benedict Glaw wrote: > Achtually, with HZ at around 100 (or oven 70..80), an old i386 or i486 > will *start* just fine, at least at 8MB. However, over some days / > weeks, the machine gets slower and slower (my testdrive: my 90MHz > P-Classic with 16MB). Even with that "much" RAM, I get hit by whatever > slows down the machine. I *think* that it's the MM subsystem, but I'm > really not skilled enough with it to blame it:) Well, unless it's an interrupts-safe critical section that's hurting, you could take profiles, provided you have enough RAM for the profile buffer (which appears to be large). You could easily do a quick hack to steal the profile buffer from e820 regions not otherwise used for RAM (i.e. unused because you did mem=) to handle that for a slow cpu with more RAM than 8MB. -- wli