Thank you for this sage advice.  I was finally able to figure out why I
was getting my "fork: Cannot allocate memory" problem.  Here's a short
synopsis of what I did:

I installed NetBSD 1.5.2 on a PowerMac G3 (beige, earlier OF).  The box
has 512M of RAM and a 10G IDE hard drive.  I partitioned the drive to have
the default root size, a 1G (2X RAM, right?) swap partition, and the rest
to /usr.

The first time I did this, I got the VM buffers strangeness.  I did
something different the 2nd time.  When, after the first reboot, it
dropped me into single user mode to edit the rc.conf, etc. I actually
activated the swap RIGHT THEN rather than let the script do the
activation.  I then finished the install, following the procedures
exactly as in the documentation.

Since I read this email, I have disabled my swap altogether (for what this
box will be doing, 512M will likely be plenty and to spare).  I have tried
to tax the system, running as many processes as were previously giving me
the "fork:" error, and have had smooth sailing ever since.  No problems
whatsoever.

I guess my question would be, "Why does a large amount of memory and/or a
large swap file do this?"  Is something not working right or broken?  Or
is this a documented problem because of the hardware I have that I was
just unaware of.  Anyway, I'm a much happier camper now.

Aaron Mildenstein

 On Thu, 21 Mar 2002, Makoto Fujiwara wrote:

> Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 21:39:11 +0900
> From: Makoto Fujiwara <makoto@ki.nu>
> To: port-macppc@netbsd.org
> Subject: Re: panic: startup: cannot allocate VM for buffers /macppc
>     quicksilver  netbsd 1.5.2
>
> From: Hans Baier <hans.baier@soluzione.de>
> Hans> I downloaded netbsd 1.5.2 official CD-Image,
> Hans> and I get that kernel panic. I have 768M RAM.
> Hans> Reducing it to 256M helped not.
>
> How much do you have for the swap ?
> My experience says 512M or 768M swap gives you kernel panic.
> If you have only a large swap partition, try commenting out
> the swap entry from /etc/fstab to see if that is really the problem.
>
> Aha, I did not read the subject line. Quick silver needs at least
> 20011221 snapshot to work if I remember correctly.
> ---
> Makoto Fujiwara
>
>