Bug#418282: missing memory requirements for upgrade from sarge

[dtutty@porchlight.ca]

> This was probably not included into the release notes of etch
> as it's
> not so easy to predict how much memory an upgrade would need.
>
> Do you have ideas on how we could test this for the release
> notes of the
> upcoming lenny release so we could include a paragraph about
> it?
>

Hi,

Sorry if this is formatted wrong; I'm using web mail while
travelling and I'm not sure what I'm doing.

Some ideas:

1.   Take a reasonably complete desktop box, keep a window
with top running and do the upgrade, watching the memory
usage.  You may also wan't to run df to watch what happens to
disk usage.  You could probably write a script that polls the
info and logs the max used.

2.   Take a reasonably complete desktop box, older, and only
give it 64 MB ram and see what happens.

3.   Use a virtual box; perhaps where the virtualization is
transparent to the OS (I'm thinking something like an IBM LPAR
but I don't know how to test this for i386) and keep
decreasing the supplied memory.

I'd volunteer to test on my PII-233 with 64 MB ram, but I'm in
the middle of a move and the computer is in storage, and I
don't have a local ISP so internet is via long-distance phone.
 I'm hoping that it works on the PII but if it doesn't, my
backup plan is to go OpenBSD for it.

Good luck.

Will Lenny provide anything for older computers or is it just
newer software and newer kernels for newer hardware?  Given
the problems I had with Etch, it will be a while before I
upgrade to Lenny.

Doug.