Hi all,

Any results on OS/2 meanwhile?

Two remarks:

1. I run win95 on my 386sx/25 8mb ram plus fpu plus gdi acceleration. It’s really far from being bad. I mean at least for all Accessoires or office 95. as stated before good gdi acceleration support is key

2. I cannot confirm the scsi remark. First the bus master feature is known to not really do on 386. I benched a lot and posted it here somewhere months ago. Result: the 160gb Seagate will do it much better and more silent than anything via scsi. Maybe also because of 8mb cache. I benched program start times I also benched opening apps while doing file transfers in the background. At least for me it was really not being worth it by far. SCSI2SD setups might be best of all maybe.

BR

I ended up going with windows 95. I like to think my system is about as optimized as a 386sx16 can be, with the exception that it is lacking GUI acceleration. Performance is... tolerable? It's slow but not horrific.

How about QNX ?

maxtherabbit wrote on 2024-01-30, 01:54:

I ended up going with windows 95. I like to think my system is about as optimized as a 386sx16 can be, with the exception that it is lacking GUI acceleration. Performance is... tolerable? It's slow but not horrific.

I ran Windows 95a on a 386sx25 w/ 4mb of ram, very slow but the system was very slow running windows 3.11 + my software also.

Depending on the windows software you are running it may run exactly the same speed under 95. Key is having enough RAM.

You might consider adding ISA Ram to max things out, the main issue is 0ws ISA RAM faster than having an SSD style solution for more virtual memory? I’m not certain what virtual memory solution would be fastest but it would be something to benchmark as you can technically set a fixed 64mb or 128mb swap file for virtual memory overriding windows defaults. If more effort would be placed to modernize virtual memory speed on an ISA card, I believe with a modern solution we could almost get it to a similar speed as real physical memory, nobody has tried to customize the virtual memory service for a purpose built card with ram specifically for use as virtual memory to eliminate a lot of the noise required to put it on a disk.

Also No idea if you could overclock ISA for better performance but more ram is what makes Windows 95 more usable.

FYI I recently benchmarked my Win95 performance with and without GDI acceleration:

Ha, ok sometimes more, sometimes less increase. But remember that the 386SX will be the bottleneck anyway.

For what it's worth, I think Debian 3.0, "Woody" was the last version to offer 386 cpu support. I don't know if you'd count this, as support for it ended in 2006. I consider it retro, but it's not necessarily 'era appropriate' for a 386.
It includes Linux Kernel 2.2 and 2.4, Xfree86 4.1, KDE 2.2, and Gnome 1.4.
I spun it up in a VM on proxmox, telling it to use 486 as the CPU, 16mb ram and a 32GB IDE disk.

I booted using the 2.4 kernel, and although the proxmox bios didn't have any 8GB boot limitations, I made a 256MB primary partition for /boot just to see if anything would go squirrely on me, a 1GB swap, and the rest for the root.

It took a hot second to do, but I did get it installed and booted into a gui. The results aren't impressive - before the GUI even starts, 100% of system ram is used and it uses an additional 18MB of swap.

If you want to give it a spin, you can grab installers (and indeed the entire software release) from here: https://cdimage.debian.org/mirror/cdimage/arc … ve/3.0_r6/i386/

I have no idea how well it would run on a 386 though - my guess is that with 8MB ram it would be effectively unusable.

Marco wrote on 2024-01-30, 08:58:

FYI I recently benchmarked my Win95 performance with and without GDI acceleration:

Ha, ok sometimes more, sometimes less increase. But remember that the 386SX will be the bottleneck anyway.

Resolution and color depth?

Marco wrote on 2024-01-29, 22:01:

2. I cannot confirm the scsi remark. First the bus master feature is known to not really do on 386. I benched a lot and posted it here somewhere months ago. Result: the 160gb Seagate will do it much better and more silent than anything via scsi. Maybe also because of 8mb cache. I benched program start times I also benched opening apps while doing file transfers in the background. At least for me it was really not being worth it by far. SCSI2SD setups might be best of all maybe.

How much MB/s did you pump out of your 160 GB HDD?

deltapi wrote on 2024-02-09, 22:45:

I have no idea how well it would run on a 386 though - my guess is that with 8MB ram it would be effectively unusable.

Quick update, with the GUI loaded, it's using a good 23+ MB of swap just idling.

Maybe use lighter WM like Window Maker or JWM (or something from that era). Gnome was considered heavy even at that time (2002 - Debian 3.0 release)

You have encouraged me to see how Redhat 5.2 (from 1998) will run on a 486DX33 😀

Takedasun wrote on 2024-02-09, 23:47:

Resolution and color depth?

1024x768x256

Disruptor wrote on 2024-02-10, 00:26:

How much MB/s did you pump out of your 160 GB HDD?

I think these were the results.

Back in the days I had a Compaq Presario model CDS 520 equipped with am486sx2 66MHz and 4MB on board memory. I've installed win95 on it, but the 4 megs caused constantly thrashing the hdd (on old quantum maverick 270MB).
Later I extended memory (2 slots each 16MB) for a total size of 36MB. Now this was quite fast, although still too slow to play mp3 files 😀

So generally I'd advise to use board supporting at least 16 megs. 32 would be plenty for it in fact.
Running win95A with 4 megs was a nightmare. Just saying.

Best I've seen win95 run on 4MB is from the floppy install version, which is pretty stripped out, not really a lot you can do on that though, apart from maybe use notepad or solitaire. Might be an idea for 8MB if you actually want to run a similarly stripped MS Office for anything.

Linux on 386/4MB is possible with some very old distros, one in particular I always remember "monkey Linux" comes in about a 20MB archive you can unzip onto an MSDOS filesystem. Based on an old slackware with a.out binaries though so even recompiling newer stuff for it might be a challenge. Well and not wanting to do it on that actual system because you'll need to leave it running 3 days to recompile a desktop toy or something.

edit: links I am finding for it now say it's ELF based not a.out, so either I got bitrot in the bonce or I had an early version in ancient times. I think the one I had came off one of the bigger FTPs like simtel or funet and may still lurk in archives and mirrors, textfiles CD archive might turn it up.

winuser_pl wrote on 2024-02-29, 23:07:

So generally I'd advise to use board supporting at least 16 megs. 32 would be plenty for it in fact.
Running win95A with 4 megs was a nightmare. Just saying.

I think the same. My father had 16 MB installed in his 386DX-40, too. Because of Windows 95.

From what I remember, about 32 MB is the point on which swapping to HDD become less frequent.

4 MB was indeed a nightmare. 😨

This memory configuration was often to be found on laptop and notebook computers of the time.

They were being built with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 in mind and predated the release of Windows 95.

While it was technically being possible to upgrade them, the memory modules often were either proprietary or model dependant.

Which means that they were no longer being available, sometimes.

That being said, OS/2 had suffered a similar fate once. 🙁
Here in my place, OS/2 once was being sold with computers that had as little as 4 MB of RAM (PCs by Vobis/Escom?)

While in reality, 8 MB was the practical minimum requirement for OS/2 2.11 and Warp 3.

The minimum requirement printed on the box, 4 MB, already had been a realistic minimum requirement in 1988 with release of OS/2 v1.1.

That's what many users had confused, I suppose.
Originating from plain DOS, they weren't being used to the circumstance that an advanced OS needs much more RAM in order to be able to "think" properly.

32MB of RAM was a ton when Win 95 first launched. Most people did not have that much memory. 4-8MB was much more realistic at launch date. However Win 95 quickly pushed people to upgrade.

As alluded to, the floppy version of Win95 was a little leaner and I used that on a 486 /w 8MB ram and it ran fine. But I was mostly still running old dos games. The heaviest windows app I used at the time was Wordperfect.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-02-29, 23:25:

Linux on 386/4MB is possible with some very old distros, one in particular I always remember "monkey Linux" comes in about a 20MB archive you can unzip onto an MSDOS filesystem. Based on an old slackware with a.out binaries though so even recompiling newer stuff for it might be a challenge. Well and not wanting to do it on that actual system because you'll need to leave it running 3 days to recompile a desktop toy or something.

I've definitelt used Slackware on a 486-33/4MB in the 90s so it should run on a 386-40/4MB no issues.

There was that one problem with locked UMA BIOS shadow on some machines though, if you had a whole 4096kB you were golden, if you had less than 39..something you couldn't load one of the stock kernels unless you stripped it down, and Doom had problems too I think.

Regarding Linux, apologies if any of this has already been mentioned:

For what it's worth slakinst/SLAKWARE.FAQ from CD 1 of the InfoMagic Linux Developer's Resource August 1995 says:

Also, I've noticed that most of the reports of kernel panics and system hangs have come from people with 4MB. If you're runn […]
Show full quote

Also, I've noticed that most of the reports of kernel panics and system
hangs have come from people with 4MB. If you're running into these types
of problems I'd suggest forking over the $$$ for 4 more meg. I have 8 MB of
RAM and never have crashes. (well, only when I really push my luck)
If you don't want to do that, then go through your /etc/rc.d/rc.* files and
get rid of any daemons you don't use, like crond, lpd, or selection.

Maybe it got more stable later on. I'm not sure I ever used it on a machine with less than 8MB of RAM myself.

Those InfoMagic CDs can be found on archive.org, search for "infomagic linux".

An easy way to play with older Linux distributions is ZipSlack, a variant of Slackware which could be installed on a FAT filesystem - it didn't need its own partition. I'm not sure if this was on any of those Infomagic CDs.

You can save memory by not having any desktop at all - don't even start X! 😁 No but seriously I did all sorts of things under Linux that way. You can use the 'screen' program to run multiple terminals and copy/paste between them, and use the 'gpm' daemon to get mouse copy and paste. If I recall correctly there was a version of DOOM that used svgalib so didn't require X.

doshea wrote on 2024-03-01, 07:48:

Maybe it got more stable later on. I'm not sure I ever used it on a machine with less than 8MB of RAM myself.

Not really. Except in the most earliest kernels, linux could not boot with only 2MB. I think they ended up hardcoding a check for 2MB minimum. The "hangs" and "crashes" wasn't because linux was unstable, but that was the sign you ran out of memory at boot, which is pretty easy at 4MB due to all the things they tried to cram in there. This is why the note you read said to start disabling things.

The reason 4MB was a problem is the distros were packing in selection of drive controller drivers directly into the kernel just so the user could boot and install the OS. Well it was unpredictable which kernels could boot in 4MB or not and no one really wanted to build more than a handful of kernels for everyone let alone test each with only 4MB. Eventually ramdisks took over the initial bootdisk selection problem, but at a cost of even more ram use. So if you were needing to do an initial boot with only a floppy and 4MB, you needed to select the bare.i which was just a boring standard IDE driver, with no other hardware features (no network) at install. Or you would have needed to compile your own kernel.

Zipslack sort of helped, because it was kind of a USB boot before USB. You could write a zip disk with a swap file built in and together with the bare 4MB kernel, you wouldn't run out of memory on the initial boot. But yeah customization was needed. I think based on numbers I collected that 4MB + 8MB swap could be enough to have a basic X11 desktop. But it would be slow. Probably no different than Win95, and harder to set up. I haven't run 4MB really anywhere since Win95 in '95. I think just having 8MB actual RAM is sooo much better already. So I think that's why really people just said to buy more RAM.