In message <E0wvL0N-0003wE-00@taurus.cus.cam.ac.uk> you wrote:
>dillema@acm.org wrote:
>> 
>> Lately, when trying to build netbsd-current on a i486 this machine
>> comes to a grinding halt now and then. The load seems to go sky-up
>> (I'm not sure how high, xload indicates a load of 3 or 4 before it
>> freezes competely, while systat last update generally shows the
>> system-cpu utilization is 99.8% or so), and interactivity goes down to
>> zero in a couple of minutes. Eventually all I can do (within my
>> lifespan) is to power-cycle/reset this machine. It's a bit strange,
>> but I managed to complete a make build without the above problem, only
>> when running a single (remote) login shell. 
>...
>
>I'll just make an fstab in the dark.. The same happened to me when I
>booted into single user and built the world without doing the
>swapctl -A
>that /etc/rc would normally have executed. This is of course linked to
>the line
>/dev/sd0b none swap sw 0 0
>in /etc/fstab. Just a thought -

Well, it was the right thought. Thanks! Never thought of that possibility
(I guess systat was lying a bit to me too, when running a current kernel and still
out-of-date userland ;}. I assumed that the primary swap needed no activation
from swapctl, and therefore never added it to fstab. My alpha ran fine as
it used two swap-partitions, which had been added to fstab for a long time...

Thanks again,

Feico.