Subject: Re: NetBSD stable on sun4m SS4?
To: Chris G Demetriou <Chris_G_Demetriou@ux2.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
From: James Graham - Systems Anarchist <greywolf@starwolf.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 07/08/1996 21:39:32
Chris G Demetriou sez:
/*
 * In particular, NetBSD has ... a couple of serious, annoying problems
 * which may cause problems for you depending on your environment.  In
 * that class, I include:
 * 
 * 	(1) the "paged shadow objects not pruned until parent exit"
 * 	    problem that people seem to like to call a "swap leak"
 * 	    even though it technically isn't,
 * 
 * 	(2) the fact that if you allocate and touch (RAM+swap) bytes
 * 	    of memory, the system will hang.

(3)	When your system decides to page for whatever reason, it seems to
	want to page out Lots O' Pages at once; i.e. suddenly a heap of
	pages expire.  The system grinds to a halt while the paging code
	takes over all available cycles.

(4)	If you do massive accesses over NFS to a fellow NetBSD machine,
	the nfsiods will hang.  Peculiarly, if you kill and restart the
	nfsds on the server, all will right itself in about a minute --
	provided you have killed the nfs-intensive process, which, if
	you have the X stuff nfs-mounted (I do, from necessity), could
	be just about anything.  Netscrape does this to my box.

I'm sure there are plans to fix these; IBNI they would be gone by the
time 1.3 (2.0) rolls out in about 8 months or whenever, but seeing as
I don't have the intimate knowledge required to fix them myself and
most others out there have a RL in addition to hacking NetBSD, I'm
not gonna hold my breath.  I'm quite astounded that it works as well
as it does, and I'm grateful to core and project-folks that I can run
something besides an unsupported OS on my Suns.

 * chris
 */





				--*greywolf;
--
When will people learn how to think!??  I long for the day to come when
software is purchased on the basis of technical merit and usefulness and not
on the basis of marketing bullsh*t.  And when is intelligence going to become
a prerequisite for survival?