Subject: Re: testing requested for VM improvements
To: Ross Harvey <ross@teraflop.com>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@kuma.web.net>
List: current-users
Date: 02/01/1998 20:05:25
[ On Fri, January 30, 1998 at 23:11:38 (-0800), Ross Harvey wrote: ]
> Subject: testing requested for VM improvements
>
> Primarily in order to support NFS paging and diskless operation, I've
> installed a few VM improvements today, including the rediscovery of a
> long-lost anti-deadlock mod from Paul Kranenburg.
> 
> This may well help in rare cases even when using the usual raw
> partition pager.

Cool!

> It would be really nice if some of you running -current could verify
> that nothing goes downhill with this change. I'm not too worried about
> NFS and diskless, since that's certainly better than it was. I'm mainly
> concerned that behavior is at least as good as before in the normal
> (raw partition pager) case, so that the mods can safely be included in
> a 1.3.1 patch release.

I'll try testing this on the Sun3 starting tonight....

> I guess I'll also accept results on NFS and diskless operation. Note that
> you may need to run swapctl -A again in /etc/rc.local in order to pick up
> NFS volumes; depending on the vintage of your /etc/rc NFS may not be up
> when swap is normally configured. Also, do confirm that you really have
> a swap configured by doing a "swapctl -l" prior to any tests!

I don't think your changes caused any additional problems on the sun3
diskless, though they didn't help any either.  The system still goes
into the "everything dumps core" mode shortly after trying to start the
X server.

There was a *lot* more NFS activity while the machine was ``hung'', but
this could have been due to something stuck in a loop dumping core and
restarting (there were inetd.core and getty.core files, for example).
 
I'd *really* like to see sun3 diskless work now that sun3's new pmap
code has made NetBSD-1.3 actually usable in comparison to SunOS-4.1.  If
there's anything else I can do to help (i.e. without spending the
prerequisite time required to learn more about the innards of the
current VM, NFS, etc. so that I could try finding the problem on my own)
please do let me know!  In fact the moment it will run for more than a
day while I use it as an X terminal and workstation I'll switch
over to NetBSD immediately!

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 443-1734			VE3TCP			robohack!woods
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets Of The Weird <woods@weird.com>