mouse@Collatz.McRCIM.McGill.EDU (der Mouse) wrote:

>> 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".  

As far as I know, noone has came up with a fix that could be
considered.

One way to fix could be the integration of the FreeBSD VM system,
which fixes most of the problems and works well.

Some time ago someone wrote he had compiled a kernel (on Sparc) with
the 'vm/' subdir of FreeBSD and he was unsure whether he should try to
boot off it. It was the last message I ever read from him...

Seriously, after FreeBSD got public CVS access, I looked over John
Dyson's work, but many commits are integration of large diffs, the
earlier ones written by John Dyson, but committed by David Greenman. I
hoped I could get a fine-graded set of log messages and little
patches, but it is not that easy. Additionally, when Dyson started,
NetBSD and FreeBSD has been already been quite different. Once again,
a thing beyond my skill level :-(

I think, however, that John Dyson did the right thing and last time
this discussion occurred here, noone had something to say against it
and some members of core participated in it. That doesn't mean they
had the chance to test it, but they didn't discourage anyone from
trying to integrate the FreeBSD VM into NetBSD.

I archived this thread the last time it flooded this list, among the
messages are detailed explanations why the VM systems leaks and what
the other problems are. Mail me if you want it, I can probably put it
on the web in the near future.

I don't think a fix for the leak alone is enough. For me, the problem
that paging is about seven times slower that FreeBSD's on my machines
is more serious. For others, the broken mmap() over NFS is.

Happy hacking
        Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  -  Fax +49 40 522 85 36
 BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany   -   No NeXTMail anymore, please.
 Copyright 1995. Redistribution via Microsoft Network is prohibited