I tried. I really did. NetBSD had an opportunity to be used as an OS on 32
compute and NFS servers in our research facility, which serves commercial and
government contracts.

But I kept running into limits that are both archaic and arcane.

The jobs we run require one process to be able to take up just about everything
left on the machine, with memory allocation to easily be 400 megs and more. But
the apparent process limit is 256 Megs.

The number of partitions available on a single disk is limiting, as we wanted
to install a 200 gig raid with partition sizes of about 10 gigs, more or less.

When I asked about these questions, I never got answers. The only person who
wrote back to me about the partition question was someone from the OpenBSD
group. He pointed out that OpenBSD had taken care of this.

I tried to figure it out myself, by looking at the code and reading the
O'Reilly BSD books about configuration, but the code has diverged from the book
enough that the book wasn't too useful.

This caused me to run out of time. The technical lead for the project
installing the computers told me to bag my research, and that we are going with
Linux, because despite it's occasional wonkiness, it was getting the job
done, and benchmarked faster the NetBSD 1.2.1.

So what am I supposed to say?

Here's reality: the lack of support is a killer. The fact that you don't
support the obvious possibilities of the hardware is a killer. We can load a
machine with 512 Megs of ram for $2000, which is not too great a price, but the
stock system has never approached being able to deal with it, despite the fact
that the hardware has been capable for a few years now.

I guess it is the case some of these issues are being addressed in the next
release.

But it's too late.
---
David C. Todd (a.k.a Hacksaw)