abs(in)the<p><span class="h-card"><a href="https://bsd.network/@ball" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">@<span>ball</span></a></span> It should definitely fit in reasonable memory sized <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/VAXen" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>VAXen</span></a>, say 16MB. The kernel can be stripped back and the ramdisk needs just enough to prompt for source and target devices, plus gzip - so much less than the current <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/sysinst" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>sysinst</span></a> based images. Something akin to the old <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/SunOS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>SunOS</span></a> miniroot boot tape.</p><p>As it happens <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/NetBSD" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>NetBSD</span></a>/ <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/amiga" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>amiga</span></a> still has a miniroot install option - you partition with <a href="https://mastodon.sdf.org/tags/AmigaOS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#<span>AmigaOS</span></a> native tools, write the miniroot to what will be the swap partition, then boot into it to complete.</p>