FreeBSD Minimum Memory Requirements

In my last post I mentioned installing FreeBSD 6.1 on a Pentium 200, specifically a Dell Dimenson XPS P200S. This box is so old-school it has that old bug that caused so much trouble for Intel. It has a "Windows 95" sticker on front and was built in 1996!
FreeBSD 6.1-SECURITY #0: Mon Aug 28 05:21:08 UTC 2006
    root@builder.daemonology.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
Timecounter "i8254" frequency 1193182 Hz quality 0
CPU: Pentium/P54C (199.43-MHz 586-class CPU)
  Origin = "GenuineIntel"  Id = 0x52c  Stepping = 12
  Features=0x1bf
real memory  = 33554432 (32 MB)
avail memory = 23379968 (22 MB)
Intel Pentium detected, installing workaround for F00F bug

Despite its age, CPU, and RAM, I am doing real work with it. Sure, I'm not serving Web pages or handling email, but I am testing IPv6. In fact, I just connected to IRC with it.
p200:/home/richard$ irssi -n user6 -c irc.ipv6.freenode.net
...edited...
22:14 -!- user6 [n=richard@2001:5c0:925d:0:204:5aff:fe79:43a7] has joined 
          #snort-gui

Using FreeBSD Update I installed all binary patches, and I am adding binary packages with pkg_add. The SSH session is very responsive. I could not run the latest version of Windows XP on this box, and Windows Vista is Right Out (TM).

If you want to see just how "low can you go," check out this great post by Nikolas Britton on FreeBSD's minimum memory requirements. I expect to see it in official documentation soon.

Comments

Anonymous said…
The 200MHz Pentium doesn't have "that old bug that caused so much trouble for Intel", i.e., the FDIV bug. It does have the F00F bug, but that caused far less trouble for Intel, mostly because it couldn't be demonstrated via spreadsheet.
3:31 PM
Richard Bejtlich said…
Hi Colin,

Of course you're right. I do have a Pentium 90 with the FDIV bug you mention. I confused the two. That box has 80 MB RAM -- I should install FreeBSD on it. :)
4:00 PM
John Ward said…
I have an old Gateway P90 with 16 meg of ram that works just great as a SSH and web proxy running FreeBSD 5.5. The only issue it has is that I have to manually interact with the boot loader to get it to boot, but it did the same thing with Linux using both GRUB and LILO as the bootloader. I never experienced an issue with it dieing while trying to load acpi.ko. The forum post author may have encountered a bug with VMWare, or at least the architecture it emulates, not necessarily FreeBSD.
7:10 PM
Anonymous said…
Web server for low-volume static content:

OpenBSD 3.8-stable (GENERIC) #2: Wed Jan 25 16:45:37 CST 2006
jladwig@mango.internal:/u2/src38/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) ("GenuineIntel" 586-class) 133 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8
cpu0: F00F bug workaround installed
real mem = 33136640 (32360K)
avail mem = 22245376 (21724K)
using 430 buffers containing 1761280 bytes (1720K) of memory


Firewall:

OpenBSD 3.6-stable (GENERIC) #20: Mon Oct 3 13:20:56 CDT 2005
root@mango.internal:/u/src36/sys/arch/i386/compile/GENERIC
cpu0: Intel Pentium II ("GenuineIntel" 686-class, 512KB L2 cache) 232 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,SEP,MTRR,PGE,MCA,CMOV,MMX
real mem = 66695168 (65132K)
avail mem = 53338112 (52088K)
using 839 buffers containing 3436544 bytes (3356K) of memory


Finally had to retire the 486-SX/33MHz w/ 8MB DRAM to get an IPv6-capable firewall. That was a nostalgic day.
9:08 PM
Anonymous said…
The link to the mailing list post seems wrong.
I found it at http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-doc/2006-August/011050.html
4:57 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more