Monday November 20, 2006

Fat Software Part 2

I found a little more fat to trim from the midget system I described in my last post. Well actually I found quite a bit but it took me down a cul-de-sac of unbootability so here, after more experimentation are the modifications that are "safe" by which I mean, of course, totally unsupported and unsupportable by Sun but useful if you have to run Solaris on an old, memory-constrained, probably beige, system.

Such a system will never run such new-fangled protocols as Infiniband, FibreChannel and iSCSI, I don't need NFS or any of the enterprise management software. I really don't actually need SCSI or IPv6 - but you can't unbolt those.

So, for the record and so you can cherrypick your own modifications, here are the scores - memory is in 4 Kb pages: I have 63374 of these to my name:

I'm calling it a day at this point. A more diligent man would put all this in a Jumpstart script but time is money and that would be a sign of obsession. The out of the box installation had 7% of its memory free and I've managed to take that to 71%. The kernel (which of course is not pageable) is down to 28 Mb. This old HP Brio has a new lease of life. But brio is the quality of being active or spirited or alive and vigorous - so I'm off to get a life.