The minimal system requirements demand updating with 9.0-RELEASE

[Manolis Kiagias]

On 12/11/2011 4:37 μμ, Mr Dandy wrote:
> Hi
>
> According to http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/install-hardware.html"
> "
> Both FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/pc98 require a 486 or better processor and at
> least 24 MB of RAM. You will need at least 150 MB of free hard drive space for
> the most minimal installation.
> "
>
Note that the "install" chapter of the Handbook refers to installations 
of FreeBSD earlier than 9.0. Though it is true that 8.X cannot be 
installed (using sysinstall and GENERIC kernel) on a system with 24Mb 
RAM (Back in the days, I managed to get a trimmed kernel of 8.0-RC1 
running on 24Mb RAM).

I've done some preliminary testing on 9.0-RC1/386 on VirtualBox and here 
are my findings (all tests using GENERIC kernel):

24 Mb: Already installed system has trouble booting - processes getting 
killed before / during mounting of file systems. When installing, 
bsdinstall chokes at early stages.
32 Mb: Installed system boots. Bsdinstall chokes uncompressing tarballs
48 Mb: Bsdinstall can complete an installation as long as "ports" is not 
selected for installation.
64 Mb: Bsdinstall can complete a full installation (very slowly!)

We should probably suggest 64Mb as an absolute minimum for 9.0 
installations.