> The merged cache helps alot of things, but frankly only helps a little
> (IMO.)  If someone has an eccentric workload, I believe that they can
> increase the size of the buffer cache manually...  I think that users
> would like a reliable OS rather than extracting all the perf from a
> system.  Merged cache mods are more likely to destablize NetBSD than
> collapse fixes or pageout perf mods.

Well, are these exclusive things? :)  StunOS has the merged cache and it's
also pretty stable.  Well, I understand that making large and complex
changes in the VM system _will_ make the OS unstable for some time.. and
I do value reliability _very_ high (even more so after two recent lockups
on my remote server).

But still, it would help with mmap() and make disk IO faster on machines
with lots of RAM... without devoting 10 MB to disk buffers permanently.
(Hey, even my Amigas (AmigaOS) run a dynamic disk cache software... ;-)

  -jm


-- 

                     ---> http://www.jmp.fi/~jmarin/ <---