there is still memory missing which can best be seen on machines with
little RAM:
I'm trying to install on a machine (386) with only 8 MB of memory. I'm
loading a compressed ramdisk (uncompressed size 2800 K) which contains our
setup tool. When executing this program, after a short time I get "bus
error", "cannot fork" or "no memory for sh". This happens with
2.0.14,15,16 and pre-17.
I tried it with 2.0.0 and all works fine. Moreover, the kernel 2.0.0 is a
very big one (684098 Bytes; almost all drivers are contained) and 2.0.17
is very small (439592 Bytes; no SCSI or CD-ROM drivers). With 2.0.0 I have
a total available memory of 6224 K, with 2.0.17 I have 6912 K available.
So, there is at least 700K-1M missing. I think it's even more, because
after some time, my program needs even more memory. With 2.0.0 it runs
flawlessly, with 2.0.17 it doesn't even reach the state where it needs
much memory.
Here are the outputs of "free" immediately after booting:
---- 2.0.0 ---------------------------------------------
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6224 5580 644 852 4096 432
-/+ buffers: 1052 5172
---- 2.0.17 --------------------------------------------
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6912 5468 1444 704 4096 432
-/+ buffers: 940 5972
Hubert mantel@suse.de