Re: port-i386/42966: kernel built from today's netbsd-5 crashes

[David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

The following reply was made to PR port-i386/42966; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: David Holland <dholland-bugs%netbsd.org@localhost>
To: gnats-bugs%NetBSD.org@localhost
Cc: 
Subject: Re: port-i386/42966: kernel built from today's netbsd-5 crashes
Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 22:26:47 +0000

 On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 02:10:05AM +0000, matthew green wrote:
  >      Turning off DIAGNOSTIC will, however, make your machine run a lot
  >      faster. (Once upon a time, DIAGNOSTIC was supposed to be cheap and
  >      only DEBUG was expensive; however, that's no longer true.)
  >  
  >  says who?
  >  
  >  at least on sparc64 DIAGNOSTIC causes only a few percent of performance
  >  loss.  the worst case i found -- ./configure -- averaged at 7% loss,
  >  but most things were 1-3%.
 
 It was the conventional wisdom a year or two ago, if not longer. Note
 that i386 GENERIC (and others) were changed to describe it as
 "expensive" instead of the traditional "cheap" at some point.
 
 Last I tried (on amd64) it was horrifying but I'm told that this has
 since been fixed.
 
 anyway, this is tangential.
 
 -- 
 David A. Holland
 dholland%netbsd.org@localhost