[Bloat] some comments on draft-ietf-tsvwg-byte-pkt-congest-10.txt

[Jonathan Morton]

On 17 Jun, 2013, at 10:40 pm, Dave Taht wrote:

> Anybody got a 68020 or slower to play with?

As a follow-up to this, I just found somewhere to plug in my 486, and it does indeed still work - even the RTC was only about a month off.  Booting from a floppy (tomsrtbt) confirms that all of the hardware seems to be in working order, including the 3c509B - the other NIC is an NE2000 clone of some sort, somewhat newer than the 3com card.

However, it needs a fresh install of Linux, which might still take some time to arrange, considering that it won't boot directly from CD, nor will the BIOS directly recognise any hard disk over 528MB.  Even tomsrtbt is too old to support the STROKE protocol for determining the real size of a modern hard disk - if 40GB can be considered "modern" - otherwise I could have used it to unpack a Gentoo stage.  Back in the day, I used a smaller disk which could be supported via a BIOS extender in the boot sector.

I think I will need to squeeze a 3.x series kernel onto a floppy disk, and use another machine to build up the rootfs on the hard disk.  Luckily, a 486 doesn't need many device drivers, but recent kernels seem to be a lot bigger in the core than older ones.

 - Jonathan Morton