"Thomas Hertz" writes:
> I just thought I'd add my comments to this list:
> 
> > When I was investigating this previously, I had determined that all of the
> > following were factors conducive to causing the problem:
> >
> > - Low system memory. My main system has only 128 MB RAM, and usually
> runs about 60 MB into swap.
> > - Large SU/chunk sizes.
> > - softdep.
> > - More columns in the RAID5 set.
> > - swap on RAID5.
> 
> My system presently has 512Mb of memory, so I guess this has something to
> do with the added disk io that comes with swapping on the raid array.

Oh!!  Are you swapping to the RAID-5 array??  There are known 
problems with doing that....

> I'm
> now running your suggested hacks in rf_netbsdkintf.c and have
> increased uvmexp.reserve_kernel to 192. This alone didnt make the system
> rock solid, so I also increased vm.kmempages from 32k to 64k, and added
> "options RAIDOUTSTANDING=3". With these mods, my system seems to be stable
> even during heavy disk usage. This is probably not a "clean" way to solve
> the problem, but it works. Noone would be more happy than me if Raid5
> would work with a vanilla kernel, but we can only hope that Greg Oster
> will have time to work with it. :) 

I'm hoping for that too.. :-}

Later...

Greg Oster