1 Oct
2012
1 Oct
'12
2:56 p.m.
On Mon, 1 Oct 2012, David Riley wrote:
On Oct 1, 2012, at 8:04 AM, Tothwolf wrote:
True. It actually would be possible to upgrade the memory via an expansion
board in the stack, or possibly even replace the on-board ram chips, but
in a case such as this, it would unfortunately be easier to replace the
PC/104 processor board and repurpose the old board for a different
application.
Most of the "newer" PC/104 boards I work with at least are able to accept
various SODIMMs, and those that I had to work with recently all seemed to
handle at least 256MB or 512MB without any major issues (finding
low-density 16-chip 256MB SODIMM modules for some of the boards wasn't the
easiest though).
Any PII and PIII will support at a minimum 512MB
of ram (even the
consumer chipsets), but as long as you have swap, 32MB or 64MB would
probably work. It's when you are running the entire OS from media such
as CompactFlash or SD card where you don't have swap that having less
memory can become a challenge with modern software (no X, gui, etc). As
cheap as second hand SDRAM modules are though, adding more memory is
the easiest solution.
Sure, assuming the option is available. For a long time, I ran my home
router on a PC-104 stack running an AMD Elan (which, if I recall
correctly, is an Am5x86 System-on-a-Chip) which had its 32MB RAM
soldered to the board. It made a certain amount of sense, since PC-104
is widely used as an industrial platform, but I certainly couldn't
expand the RAM.
In any case, this ran OpenBSD 3.0 on a 32 MB CompactFlash just fine
(stripped down to fit, of course, but fine) and handled all the traffic
to our webserver over the DSL line just fine. I don't anticipate that
modern OpenBSD would perform the same; we recently upgraded to a
Mini-ITX Atom board with 2 GB of RAM and run modern OpenBSD relatively
comfortably.