Geir Harald Hansen <geirhans@ifi.uio.no> writes:

> I bet you don't try to compile 1.3M .c files often? Well, I did ;) Now I get
> "virtual memory exhausted". And I'm HAPPY when I see this, because the only
> way I got this message when I had 4M mem was when I used 'limit', otherwise
> I would get a kernel panic! Same thing with the standard fvwm setup.. it 
> tries to start up a lot of things at the same time, BANG -> kernel panic. :(
> (I have 32M swap so this last thing makes me think the VM system also
> can crash if the load is too high? it couldn't have been swapping 32M?)

I had 5 different users (each with several screen/rlogin windows) on my
system yesterday.  I have 16 MB of RAM and I was running X (xv, x48, xterm,
etc.).  Load average was around 4 and swap usage 32 MB of 64 MB.  inn and
nnmaster were processing news, people were reading news, using emacs and
other stuff.  NO crash.  In fact, uptime is 4 days now - but don't worry,
it will certainly crash when least expected. ;-)

> Seems to me this is one of the first things that needs fixing. One of the
> things unix does better than ados is stability, but not so with netbsd
> yet :( If I had the knowledge I'd work on it myself, but my background is
> all amiga and no unix. (Taking a course with kernel hacking at the
> university now :) it's minix though ;( )

Yes, I feel this is the most serious problem with Amiga NetBSD, too.  Too
bad I'm not a kernel guru (and am too busy to read and understand the whole
kernel on my own ;) - but I'm hoping to try something sometime soon, at
least.

It's just so weird - the high load and swap usage of yesterday _should_
have caused problems, but no..  and the crashes may occur any time, even
when the machine appears to be almost idle.

> Sorry for the long post.. and this is no flame :) NetBSD/amiga is the
> best thing that has happened to the amiga in a looong time!

I agree.  I just wish the last (few?) stability problems could be fixed
(and having disconnect in the SCSI driver would be great, too!).

  Jukka Marin


P.S. Sorry for the flame I posted last week.  At least it seemed to wake
     up some people and I see that I'm not alone.  Other people want to
     see this problem fixed as well - and there are many who believe that
     there _is_ a problem.  So far, so good.  Let's hope the bug will be
     found soon.


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