how many memory is needed for FreeBSD 9 ?

[andrew clarke]

On Sun 2012-10-21 18:21:59 UTC+0200, Patrick Lamaiziere (patfbsd at davenulle.org) wrote:

> I'm updating an old laptop running FreeBSD 8.1 with 64 MB ram (44MB
> available) but now FreeBSD 9.1 panics at boot time:
> 
> panic: kmem_malloc(4194304): kmem_map too small: 24584192 allocated?

That's one very old laptop. I think you'll need to install more memory
or downgrade FreeBSD to an earlier version.

9.1-RELEASE isn't available yet, only 9.1-RC1 & RC2. Given it's
prerelease code it's plausible the 9.1-RC2 kernel requires more memory
at boot than 9.1-REL will. Attempting to boot 9.0-REL from CD on your
laptop should answer that question.

>From my limited testing under VirtualBox, 96 MB RAM is about the lower
limit that will allow FreeBSD 9.1-RC2 to boot before the swap
partition is enabled. Any less and the kernel will freeze or panic at
boot. This was with the amd64 version though, not i386.