Barking up wrong tree? (was Re: buildworld problem on cyrix 166)

[John Mills]

Freebies -

Those with longer attention spans than mine [nowadays] may remember a
thread about problems of consistent failure while running 'buildworld'. My
and a few others' builds failed at the same line, and as we had the same
low-end processors, I blamed some phantom CPU dependency. I put fBSD aside
then and now want to use it, but I still have some update-related
questions.

Q1) Alternative possible cause: I once had a [non-fBSD] problem where a
linking a large library required a larger amount of "live" RAM than I had.
Swap space wouldn't do. As in this case, it always failed at the same
point because the GCC linker couldn't lay out the required image in my
limited RAM. My "sandbox" fBSD box is definitely 'RAM-challenged' (49MBy
if I remember). Could this happen on a 'buildworld' step? Specifically my
'buildworld's were failing around 'libncurses'.

Q2) Implications of problem: I was rebuilding my kernel [RELENG_4_8 on the
last go-round] in case there had been security fixes in the code since the
CD images were released, not because of any observed problem. Is this a
real concern? If so, is there a source of up-to-date 'generic' builds I
could use instead, or some more brain- and less RAM-intensive approach?

Thanks.

 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu