General Questions

Hello friends,

I would like just to say that I am very disappointed of reading that the new betas based on FreeBSD 1.8 will not be supported on systems with 64 MB of RAM.

I've been using Monowall for years with my lovely Soekris 4501 and I believe that you should make an effort for keep it running on 64 MB systems.

Monowall was our last chance for such small embedded systems, I would take it as a challenge instead of seeing it as a limitation, there is a lot of people out there that still run Monowall because it runs in 64 MB of RAM, you can find Soekris 4501 boards in Ebay for less than 40$....

Please please please... I beg you kindly take into account this petition for the future of the project,
if I am forced to buy a bigger board what will stop me from installing pfSense ? What will the difference be ?

If you think that running into 64 MB is no longer possible, then I am two times disappointed,
because I realize that you have not yet understood why you have had such a success in the previous years.

"Challenges are what make life interesting; overcoming them is what makes life meaningful."

Hello,

the fact that there are 1.8 betas available doesn't mean you must upgrade your 4501 – if 1.33 works for you now, then there's no reason to change anything. If you need more/new features, then it's another story, as always.

That said, Andy White has made a considerable effort to build a 1.8 version that boots directly from a FAT32 partition (using syslinux), meaning that there is no more need for a big root MFS that eats away a lot of RAM. There are no ready-made images of that available yet because it still needs some fine tuning, but one can get started with the scripts that already exist – see <http://svn.m0n0.ch/wall/branches/freebsd8/build/scripts/experimental-syslinux.sh>.

Of course, your (code) contributions to improve this (and to reduce the memory usage in general) would be very welcome...........

Regards,

Manuel

and of course read the instructions at the bottom of

http://svn.m0n0.ch/wall/branches/freebsd8/build/scripts/README

I have tested the syslinux install and found it works fine, but it's not in the snapshots as we aren't ready to directly support it yet, but i'm happy to help out.

For what it is worth my Soekris 4501 has been running the generic-pc-serial-1.8.1.img.

The caveat is that the memory usage stays >85% with NO services running except the DHCP server, so at the moment I'm not sure what will happen if I put anything more than a minimal demand on the machine.

Edit:
Actually I am starting to have problems with the m0n0wall installation losing connection to the WAN interface every day and requiring a reboot. I suspect that this is related to the log entries indicating that the kernel is killing php pids due to lack of swap space. If so it looks like m0n0wall 1.8.1 does indeed require more RAM to run problem free than the Soekris 4501's 64MB.