In message <39681743.9D352005@igps.org>"J. Buck Caldwell" writes

[ real memory consumption on uvax-II]

I do take your point. Much of my early BSD kernel hacking was on
II/RC, then on a dec 3100. but as far as I can tell, Ultrix
4.2a for those same machines shiped with FD_SETSIZE at 4096.
Where were the howls of agony then? :->

> Or rather, set the default to 256 in GENERIC, and let you modify it
>to your heart's content in a custom build (um, like it is now, I
>guess)

That's the problem: recompiling _everything_. Most other unix variants
for today's hardware ship with FD_SETSIZE (in libc, the rpc library,
named ...) already set to 1024.