Re: Unbloating the kernel, was: :mem=16MB laptop testing

[William Lee Irwin III <wli@holomorphy.com>]

On Tue, 2003-10-14 18:33:49 +0100, John Bradford <john@grabjohn.com>
> 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