ir320@sdccs6.UUCP (07/16/84)
What does Unix require from a computer in terms of file space and memory? How much Unix does this include? John Antypas UC San Diego UUCP- ...!sdcsvax!sdccs6!ir320 arpa- sdcsvax!sdccs6!ir320@Berkely
tomk@ur-laser.uucp (Tom Kessler) (07/17/84)
There are of course all sorts of questions about how much you want to pay
in performance for running unix on a small machine.
I have seen an ibm pc with a ten megabyte hard disk, and 640K of memory
running VENIX-86 (made by venturcom I believe) this version is has kernel
of ~ 240Kbytes. It is a stripped down system III with a fair number of
the Berkley enhancements. It has almost all of the usual UNIX tools
and ( purely subjective measurement ) responds about as well as
a VAX 750 with ten users editing, running a few programs,etc.
There is the disadvantage, however, that once you have put VENIX on
the hard disk, you have a only about 2 megabytes of disk space free.
There are some systems as small as a pdp11/23+ running Berkley 2.8
with 256K of memory . I know of one such system with
40 meg. of disk space that has a user population of dozen or so people
that is reputed to be a dog when there are more than two users on
at a time.
Right now I am using a SUN 100 with a SUN2 cpu 2 megabytes of memory
and 100 megabytes of disk space, that runs the entire BERKLEY 4.2 Unix,
and has a kernel size of about 300K. With a single user this machine
is really quite nice however if you are into serious number crunching
it would probably not suit your purposes.
Another thing to consider is whether or not your machine has virtual
memory facilities. This of course allows the use of more than the real
amount of memory usually by paging onto a disk. This of course is
a real advantage in that it allows you to use very large data and program
spaces but requires more disk space and fast disk access time.
The SUN does allow virtual address extension but neither the ibmpc
nor the pdp series do.
--
thanks for all the fish...
Tom Kessler {allegra |seismo }!rochester!ur-laser!tomk
Laboratory for Laser Energetics Phone: (716)- 275 - 3786
250 East River Road 275 - 3194
Rochester, New York 14623mcdermot@unmvax.UUCP (07/18/84)
We have here an 11/23 (among other things) with 256k RAM and
2 7.5MB hard disks (for a total of 15 Megs). There are up to
13 simultaneous users out of a user community of 150! Most
of the work is editing and cross-assembling.
The system runs 2.8BSD, and will soon run 2.9 (we are porting the
system at this time). The system has no manuals on line and some
utilities have been removed to save space, but the system is built
so that USERS and SYTSTEM can live on ONE DISK! (The one disk version
is used only if the other platter crashes.)
So unix(tm) is not really such a hog for resources.
--john
--
John McDermott {gatech|ucbvax|convex}!unmvax!mcdermot
Univ of NM W (505) 277-4650
Albuquerque, NM 87131 H (505) 255-7796