Re: Life at 4 bogomips
" Raymond A. Ingles" wrote:
>
> On Sun, 9 May 1999, George Bonser wrote:
> > Well I got the old 386 put back together, figured I would use it for a
> > firewall. 386SX33 with 10MB of RAM. Man, what an example to show what OS
> > bloat has done! I used to install Win31 on it, even installed OS/2 Warp
> > on it. Now it is running Debian and MAN is it S-L-O-W.
Heh, I ran GNU/Linux, on a 486sx/25 with 6MB ram and a 130MB harddrive running
most of it from a "live" directory structure on the CDROM, a few years ago circa
1995. It was Slackware at the time, but in general everything ran very well. I
even ran X Window on it, and it did just fine! A bit slow, but it *worked*!
> Once installed, though, things are zippy emough. Irving (my 386) is not a
> speed demon, but I actually ran X on it once, just to see if I could, and
> it worked reasonably well.
Yep. See above.
> > I guess I won't be compiling any kernels on that box ... well, maybe ONE
> > just to see how long it takes.
> Okay, now *that's* going to take quite a while on a modern kernel. Hope
> you've got a week or two to spare. :->
The average compile time for a kernel, (1.2.8ish or so) on the 486sx/25 6MB took
about 6 hours. (of course you have to also realize that all the binaries were
being run from the "live" filesystem on the CDROM too! That was even slower than
paging physical memory to the swap partition.) I used "time make zImage" to time
it. :) I was living in a school dormitory at the time, so I would just set the
compile to go while I went to class, and it'd be done when I came home in the
afternoon. :^) And I could telnet into it through the phone line while working
at my "help desk" job on campus. :^)
I was also using SLiRP at that time with a dialup shell account on an AIX
machine of the school's to be one of the first, if not the first student at LSU
to have WWW access in a campus dorm! >;^) SLiRP was great!!! All my 'puter
friends were jealous 'cause they couldn't figure it out. :^)
> A 386 is a nice machine in some
> ways, but it's never been the fastest compiler in the world.
> On the other hand, let me tell you about coding under Minix on an 8088
> w/512K of RAM... :->
Heh, let's try not to start another flame fest with Andy Tannenbaum... ;^) ...
You never never know *what* something like that can lead to... (=:]
--Brock Lynn
--------------------- PGP key ID: FED76A3D <brock@cyberdude.com> 4 / 5 / 1999
__ _ Debian GNU R. Brock Lynn <brock@nettronix.net>
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