[ On Sunday, January 18, 2004 at 21:59:04 (+0100), Havard Eidnes wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: MP?
>
> Oh, I'm sorry; I didn't mean to imply that.  In my experience,
> it's also been stable when I've been doing builds.

Ah, OK.  I assume you keep setiathome running while you do builds too,
and if so then your CPU utilization will likely be almost always near
100%...

> Well, I've not updated since Dec 8 2003, so I'm not quite on the
> bleeding edge right now.  Furthermore, most of my build runs have
> been done "-j 1", so for the build itself the execution of the
> individual steps has been serialized.

... as without either "-j 2" or "CFLAGS+=-pipe" or some other decent
workload running simultaneously on the machine (like the setiathome
process(es) I assume you do keep running) then I'm not sure you'd tax
the MP bits enough with a serial build to encounter any lockups.

The other thing that seems common to a good portion of the reported
lockups on the netbsd-1-6 branch is use of the NFS code, and in in my
case it's the client code, though I'm fairly sure I've seen my machine
lock up even without any NFS access happening at the time (though it's
hard to tell when one's $HOME is on NFS ;-)

> I tried running code from netbsd-1-6 initially on my cs20, but
> switched to -current after a few crashes/hangs, and when a few
> port-specific MP fixes were committed to the trunk (and not
> pulled up), if I recall correctly.  It's been a while.  In short,
> I would recommend you re-try with more -current bits.

Hmmm....   Given the state of the NetBSD releases right now I'd be more
inclined to try and find those "port-specific MP fixes" and help test
them on the netbsd-1-6 branch so that they can be pulled up, especially
if they are responsible for stabilizing your machine.

In my mind this issue is a serious show-stopper for 1.6.x on Alpha (we
can't seriously claim MP support on Alpha for 1.6.x right now), though I
guess it's not really a show-stopper for 1.6.2 on any other platforms,
and 1.6.2-RC1 does seem quite stable on Alphas not running MP.

However I'm guessing there will be a 1.6.3 some day (even if 2.0 arrives
first) and even if not I plan following netbsd-1-6 myself for some time
yet, so if anyone can point at changes I could pull up and test myself,
and/or if anyone wants full console access to my machine....

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>