Subject: Fun with old ThinkPads
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: J. Blank - NetBSD Mailing Lists <netbsd@twu.net>
List: port-i386
Date: 01/24/2003 03:43:48
I have a nice ThinkPad 360CE (I think). I am a relative newbie to NetBSD 
and I am unsure of what is eating my memory. It seems like processes 
with PIDs 2 through 8 (presumably spawned by init?) are, together, 
gobbling 12MB of my 20MB of RAM (WTF???).

Here is the output of 'free' (yes, it is a script which emulates the Linux 
command of the same name):

             total       used       free    buffers
Mem:         13544      12532       1012          0
Swap:        66020          0      66020

And here is the output of 'ps auxw':

USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ   RSS TT STAT STARTED    TIME COMMAND
root   0  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DKs   4:08PM 0:00.02 [swapper]
root 297  0.0  5.8 580  1172 E0 Ss    4:33PM 0:01.72 -bash 
root 180  0.0  1.9 224   376 ?? Ss    4:10PM 0:00.13 /usr/sbin/cron 
root 175  0.0  0.0  60     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/inetd -l 
root  87  0.0  0.0 168     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 /usr/sbin/syslogd -s 
root   8  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.28 [aiodoned]
root   7  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:03.40 [ioflush]
root   6  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.61 [reaper]
root   5  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.17 [pagedaemon]
root   4  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pcic0,0,1]
root   3  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pcic0,0,0]
root   2  0.0 63.8   0 12828 ?? DK    4:08PM 0:00.00 [pms0]
root   1  0.0  0.0 340     4 ?? SWs        - 0:00.00 init 
root 322  0.0  1.2 372   244 E0 R+    4:35PM 0:00.03 ps auxw 

What in heck are these things, and why are they eating all of my RAM!? 
About all that I can guess at are pcic0,0,[01] (i.e. my PCMCIA drivers, 
no?) and pagedaemon (some sort of swapspace handler)? And reaper, I 
suppose, kills old tasks?

Why are these things eating so incredibly MUCH RAM?