There are some problems with vmmon module (i.e. the vmware module).
If space in /tmp runs out, it causes trouble. Also, you are very
likely to make your machine unusable with mfs bigger than amount of
physical RAM AFAIK.

If you use vmware, you need to set TMPDIR to some location with
plenty of space (it needs to store image of the running virtual
machine there, which is easily 100MB). I'd also recommend getting
more memory, 128MB is likely to be too small for reasonable use
with vmware.

Jaromir

Germano Cesari wrote:
> I modified /etc/fstab so to have mfs mounted at boot, everything works
> fine (maybe a little faster?) but here something strange happens:
> 
> when I start vmware (even with a machine with only 32 megs, the one that
> worked fine without mfs), it just goes through (trough? :-)) the POST
> and than simply HALT the whole system (I mean the NetBSD system), in
> just 5 secs, without all the thrashing it used to do before mfs.
> 
> no hdd activity, no thrashing, nothing, just a plain _dead_ OS, and in a
> matter of seconds. I kept this mummy frozen for the whole night, but I
> dont think it was making improvements of any sort, I just dont think it
> was doing anything at all... isnt that puzzling?
> 
> is there a way to monitor whats goin on? (is the system really frozen?
> and if so, why? when I reboot I dont have any core file). Remote
> connections of any sort are useless, the system is just down (ping works
> anyway)... any clue? is there a way to probe for some cpu life-signs in
> that state?
> 
> Germano
> 
> On Tue, 2002-10-29 at 17:41, Greywolf wrote:
> > On 29 Oct 2002, Germano Cesari wrote:
> > 
> > # anyway, pstat -s tells me wd0b is at 7%, so whats the need of mounting
> > # mfs on /tmp? do this make things faster?
> > 
> > In a word, yes.  Any program which needs temporary files with which to
> > work (cc, sort, others...) will see an improvement, especially on slower
> > machines (even on my workstation which is no slug, real time for a copy
> > from disk to mfs is about half the time for a copy from disk to disk
> > (and yes, I picked a filesystem on which I could cache-invalidate by
> > umounting) of a 3.5MB file.  Time for mfs -> mfs copy appears to be
> > about half that.  The difference on disk -> disk will depend on your
> > disks.  But I digress.
> > 
> > Another advantage of mfs is that it goes *poof* on a reboot or unmount,
> > so if the system crashes and your compilers or other things (like X)
> > have left their garbage there, unable to recover, when the system comes
> > back, it's already gone (never mind that /tmp is usually set to get
> > cleaned on a reboot anyway...).
> > 
> > 				--*greywolf;
> > --
> > 
> 


-- 
Jaromir Dolecek <jdolecek@NetBSD.org>            http://www.NetBSD.org/
-=- We should be mindful of the potential goal, but as the tantric    -=-
-=- Buddhist masters say, ``You may notice during meditation that you -=-
-=- sometimes levitate or glow.   Do not let this distract you.''     -=-