On Mar 16, 2007, at 7:23 PM, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> I've been running various incarnations of the netbsd-1-6 branch on
> several MP AlphaServers without too much trouble (albiet with most of
> Michael's PMAP and locking patches), including on a 3-CPU 4100 w/ 
> 2GB, a
> 2-CPU 264DP w/1GB, and a 4-CPU ES40 w/16GB.  Indeed there are some
> occasional crashes due to MP locking bugs, but they're usually rare
> enough to only be annoying.

Do Michael's patches actually work/resolve issues?  if so, how many  
years
does it take before it gets checked into the code?  I think a really big
problem is that these patches can become irrelevant because work stops
on the older branch and none of the post release fixes get rolled  
into 3.x
or 4.x.  That is sort of boggling how that works.  I wonder how many  
weekly
builds occur with absolutely no changes.

> I haven't tried 3.x, and at this point I won't -- I'll just jump to  
> 4.x
> and follow the netbsd-4 builds.  I've been running MP 4.x kernels on a
> couple of i386 Xeon boxes without any problems, doing lots of builds
> with source on NFS and with local disk and/or RAID controllers for the
> build directories, running things like Firefox, emacs, etc.

I've been working a bit with Christos with 3.1 (using the 3.0.2 kernel)
without the pmap/locking patches.  Christos gave me a patch for  
vfs_subr.c
which I'm not sure resolved any of the NFS issues I've been seeing.

Like you Greg, I'm sticking to one version (2.1) with one test/ 
production
machine running for MP/vnode testing.

(PS, sorry if I sound like an ass.  I'm obviously I'm not at the  
point that
Anders is at :)  I don't think I'd make such a shift as to go to TRU64).

I'd really like to see Michael Hitches 'fixes' incorporated ..