Bug#783773: debian-installer: supporting low-memory kfreebsd installs
Package: debian-installer
Version: 20150422
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch
To follow shortly are some patches in the jessie-kfreebsd branch that
should be applicable to sid also.
Reducing MFSROOT size very slightly allows the kfreebsd-amd64 installer
to work again on systems with 144 MiB total memory. Whether using the
GTK or non-GTK image, it will run in low-memory text mode.
There seems to be enough free memory to run in GTK mode even on 256 MiB
systems, so I've enabled that. This is highly desirable, since GTK mode
enables many more locales than are available in text mode.
256 MiB is probably the smallest amount of memory that will be found in
a real amd64 machine. Virtual machines will typically have much more
than this, but a notable exception is qemu-system-x84_64 in wheezy,
which defaults to 128 MiB; there is no way we can support that in
jessie-kfreebsd.
The most memory-hungry thing is ZFS. Giving only 128 MiB swap, a GTK
install can be completed to ZFS with only 256 MiB total memory. partman
does already prompt users to create swap *and* recommend 512 MiB memory
to use ZFS. (Without any swap, install to ZFS will fail even in text
mode and with 512 MiB memory, so using GTK mode has no detriment on
ZFS installs).
-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: kfreebsd-amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: kFreeBSD 9.0-2-amd64-xenhvm-ipsec
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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