#define Jukka "jmarin@teeri.jmp.fi (Jukka Marin)"
#define Kevin "Kevin P. Neal"

/*
Jukka:  Regular rebooting because of a kernel
Jukka: 'feature' doesn't sound very professional to me. :)

Indeed.  SunOS drives me nuts on busy machines because the kernel
(or mountd or automount or something) fails to roll the NFS minor device
number back around to the beginning of the device address list.
This causes things like 'pwd' to behave very strangely.

Kevin:  Didn't cgd show that platform-independent bounce-buffers can't
Kevin:  be done? Or at least can't be done for i386 + Alpha platforms?
Kevin:  I mean, we have plenty of i386 ways, but they don't work on
Kevin:  the alpha. (I think). So why not give in, put in the bounce
Kevin:  buffers on the i386, and then fix it if you come up with a
Kevin:  workable solution in the future.

I agree with this; we need to stop looking for the "magic bullet" that
is being so highly touted, and address the problems at hand.

Jukka: Is this a big problem on Alphas?  I guess there are lots of ISA SCSI
Jukka: cards around for i386, but I think most Alpha users would use PCI
Jukka: cards instead?  This isn't a problem to me; if/when I get a i386 box
Jukka: to run NetBSD, I'll get a PCI SCSI interface for it.

Kevin:  Notice that ftp.cdrom.com is a FreeBSD box, Yahoo internet search
Kevin:  is a FreeBSD box, and NetBSD is doing not nearly as big a job
Kevin:  at anything. FreeBSD tends to be used for larger servers because
Kevin:  of those two problems. 

Jukka: I'm installing new NetBSD boxes in several places here, and I'm a bit
Jukka: worried about the memory leakage.  I can live without the
Jukka: bounce buffers. ;)

Well, whether or not you can live without them is moot.  As has been
pointed out, there are a LOT of people out there who would like these
problems not to exist any more.

I'd hate to see NetBSD dry up because of this.  I might end up with
a x86 and a sun4m in my possession (Yes, I *know* the current state of
NetBSD/sun4m), and I don't want to end up running FreeBSD on one and
NetBSD on the other.

Jukka: Again, I really appreciate the work that people have done for NetBSD.
Jukka: I just wish the remaining problems could be fixed (yeah, I know, there
Jukka: are other problems than these, I just don't know about them ;-)
 */

#undef Jukka
#undef Kevin

By the way, having NetBSD/sparc is misleading; sparc architectures include
sun4, sun4m, sun4c, sun4d, and sun4u.  They are all considered "sparc".
I think we should consider moving "sparc" to "sun4c" in order to keep the
architectures straight.


				--*greywolf;
--
Sun could have remained quite profitable by staying with BSD-based OSs, and
they wouldn't have pissed off NEARLY as many customers.