RL02 version of UNIX6?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Wed Feb 1 13:34:53 CST 2017


    > From: William Degnan

    > doesn't hurt to try I suppose

Absolutely.

    > My fear is that it will not have enough RAM on top of whatever other
    > issues are present.

Oooh, good point - I hadn't thought of that.

I couldn't quickly find a 'minimum memory required' in the release notes for
V6; the 'Unix Summary' says it needs "48K to 124K words".

I think that might be a bit excessive; I seem to recall our -11/40 had, to
start with, only 48KB.

Anyway, try it, and let us know what happens. How much memory does the system
have on it now?


If it doesn't work, I can do some experiments and see what's the least amount
of memory one needs.

There are a whole bunch of parameters which will reduce the size of the
resident OS; if necessary, I can turn them all down to the minimum, and see
what we get - although just reducing the number of disk buffer may do it.

As for the applications, it does swap, so there's no requirement for more than
one process to be resident at a time, so whatever the largest is - probably
the C compiler - there only needs to be enough memory left over after the OS
is loaded, for that one. It looks like the shell is about 10KB, for example.


If it won't boot, don't trash the disk: if we send you another bootable disk,
we can make it tiny (only Unix, and enough files to get it running: /etc/init,
/bin/sh, etc), and if/once it books, you can mount the disk you just wrote and
move the bootable Unix system image over, and then reboot on the current disk,
to get to the rest of the stuff.

Do you have two working RL drives on the machine?

	Noel


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