Re: Long boot times...

[Nick Holland <nick@holland-consulting.net>]

You REALLY want to get more memory in that poor thing...

If you really can't (or can't get a machine that takes more RAM),
check to see if there is some kind of BIOS option (as was not
uncommon) to "re-allocate" some of the memory between the 640M and the
1M points to "extended" RAM.  This won't give you much, only 256k RAM,
typically (384k, if your machine enables you to not "slush" or
"shadow" the ROMs...which for a 32bit OS, doesn't help anything
anyway), but when you are as short on RAM as you probably are, that
might effectively double the RAM you have available to apps.

Enlarging the swap won't help anything...  The problem isn't having
too little swap, sounds like the problem is having too little RAM, and
you are having to USE the swap too much.

Building a new kernel with nothing but what you need would probably
make it rather useable...however this would be very unpleasant to do
on THIS system (esp. as building a kernel is probably one of the more
memory intensive tasks you will do on a console system...)

Nick.

Jeff Ross wrote:
> 
> Now, my next question :-)
> 
> I'm completely new to OpenBSD.  How long does it take to boot the system
> on an 8 meg machine?
> 
> My first boot after this fresh installation was slow, but ssh-keygen was
> making keys and so on.  The boot took about 30 minutes to get past
> "preserving editor files", and then finally stalled (I guess) after
> showing me the date.
> 
> After a couple of hours of watching the disk light solidly on and
> listening to the disk thrash, I tried various key combinations to break
> out of the startup attempt.  Nothing worked, so I cycled the power to try
> again.
> 
> The next two attempts didn't have to wait for keygen, but the delays still
> started with "preserving editor files", stalling, again, after the date
> line appears.
> 
> I tried booting with verbose enabled, but apparently after the hardware is
> scanned the verbose method doesn't apply, so, other than seeing that my
> hardware is all being found, I didn't gain anything.
> 
> Is this a lack of ram problem?  Should I try booting from the installation
> floppy, mounting the wd0 and wd1 to /mnt and /mnt2, and playing with some
> of the startup options?  I can cut back on the number of virtual
> consoles--what else can I try?
> 
> Maybe I'm just not patient enough ;-)
> 
> Thanks in advance,
> 
> Jeff Ross

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