Subject: All my problems solved, new 64 MB kernel available
To: None <port-arm32@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Kjetil Bernhard Thomassen <thomassk@oslo.geco-prakla.slb.com>
List: port-arm32
Date: 09/16/1996 21:31:26
Finally, my problems with 1.2 have been solved.

Mark found the kernel problem after some trial and error.

He has released a new kernel that works fine for me, and it 
is called bsd-4634-64MB.gz.

Here is a quote from his email where he describes the problem:

> The problem appears to be that the kernel was running out of kernel
> virtual address space. The kernel has 32MB of virtual space allocated
> to it which is used for mapping kernel buffers, kernel malloces mbufs
> and all the other kernel data structures. On a typical 32MB machine
> of the order of 24MB of this virtual space is reserved by the kernel
> during startup, the rest is space.  Out of this kernel virtual
> memory on a small section will actually have physical pages mapped
> to it.
> With 64MB certain parameters change e.g. the number of buffers
> to allocate.  By default on a 64MB machine over 13MB of virtual
> memory is reserved for buffers although in practice less than 1MB
> is probably ever used. However the addition virtual memory required
> for the extra buffer space etc. is pushing the total kernel vm space
> over 32MB thus the VM_NO_SPACE errors.  
 
> Long term solutions are either to allocate more vm space to the
> kernel (means modifying the kernels memory map
> (i.e. addresses > 0xf0000000) or making sure that allocation of
> buffers etc do not exceed 32MB.  In practice one could argue that
> 32MB is plenty for the kernel VM area as you don't expect the
> kernel every to really need that muchg phys memory so a lot of
> the space will not actually be used.
 
This kernel has been tested on the following configuration:
- Risc PC 600 (old model)
- ARM610 rev. 5
- RISC OS 3 v. 3.5
- 2 MB VRAM
- 64 MB DRAM
- 210 MB Conner CFS210A IDE drive (not used for RiscBSD)
- Acorn Access+ Ethernet card (network socket, EtherH, 10base-2, 10base-T)
- Power-tec SCSI-2 v. 1.01 (hardware)
- HP C3325A 2 GB SCSI-2 Disk, with
	- 400 MB RISC OS
	- 100 MB root
	- 100 MB swap
	- 1.5 GB /usr
- Quantum LP52S 50 MB SCSI-2 disk, not used for RiscBSD.
 

I have seen some problems with the EtherH card, but that is to
be expected as the new driver is not implemented yet.
 
All software transferred with ftp works fine, though.
 

I also have Xarm-21 up and running.


RiscBSD is not configured the way I want it, but that is quite
another issue. The main thing is that the software works and
that it *can* be configured.

Now the time has come for me to start my work on documentation.


My final comment is this: 1.2 should be OK to install for everyone.


Kjetil B.