>> But then, given how core has been resisting bounce buffers in the
>> i386 port, we may have to [live with it] or keep private patches for
>> it.

> Hmm, why doesn't core want problems to be solved?  What is their
> goal?  To give us lots of bells and whistles while some of the basic
> functions of the OS are severely broken?

Well, I can hardly speak for core.  But from what little I know of
their reasons, I think they're unwilling to commit an un"clean" fix,
for some definition of "clean".  I can to some extent understand this,
since if the misbehavior goes away the incentive to come up with a good
fix also largely goes away.  But in the case of bounce buffers, I don't
think there is any clean fix, because it's an ugly hardware bug.  In
the case of the VM shadow object leak, there probably is no clean fix
short of redesigning the whole VM subsystem....

> I can't even tell any 'outsider' about the VM problem because that
> would make them think NetBSD is completely useless for professional
> users.

Heh.  No worse than the vendor binary-only OS on my home machine, which
is a Mach derivative and - AFAICT - suffers from the same bug.  It's
just less obvious because it's harder to definitely identify without
kernel source :-)

No, the shadow object leak doesn't make the system useless.  The buffer
discoherency bug almost does, though.

					der Mouse

			    mouse@collatz.mcrcim.mcgill.edu