version=3.0.3
Sender: port-i386-owner@NetBSD.org

This machine will see no idle due to a program which runs niced to 20
and will eat any computation cycles with almost no idle.  This
program, which is similar to setiathome (but processing data for a
different radio telescope), was also running before, with no changes
in configuration, resource usage per data unit, etc.  And both of the
kernels had APM enabled as well.  Unfortunately, I have not
instrumented it to the point where I can tell whether it has slowed
down in processing...that is one of the things I had been meaning to
do, but had not yet had a chance to complete.

- Doug

Quoting Jonathan Stone (jonathan@Pescadero.dsg.stanford.edu):
> 
> In message <20060118010429.GA12442@pell.home.ka8zrt.com>Douglas Wade Needham writes
> >Greetings John, and the rest of the NetBSD community,
> >
> >I don't think it is just the sun3 port.  I did a build of a set of
> >pkgsrc packages about three weeks ago with a 2.1.0 kernel, and the
> >build took 76913 seconds.  Then, I noticed that 3.0 was available, and
> >after making changes to my build wrapper scripts, building 3.0 into my
> >sandbox, and upgrading to the 3.0 kernel, I started the same exact
> >build for 3.0, and the build is still going after 186920 seconds!!!
> >The same build techniques, the same pkgsrc tree, roughly the same disk
> >usage on the very same drive with the main difference being a 2.1
> >vs. 3.0 kernel, and the sandbox into which I chroot to do the build
> >has the matching binaries produced with the same scripts.  Here are
> >more details:
> >
> >    Kernel:		GENERIC.APM (a generic kernel with APM enabled)
> 
> 
> this may be a dumb question, but: Is it possible APM is throttling
> down your CPU when it's ``idle''?  Do you get the same behaviour if
> you remove APM from your kernel, or disable APM/ACPI in your BIOS
> (or both)?

-- 
Douglas Wade Needham - KA8ZRT        UN*X Consultant & UW/BSD kernel programmer
Email:  cinnion @ ka8zrt . com       http://cinnion.ka8zrt.com
Disclaimer: My opinions are my own.  Since I don't want them, why
            should my employer, or anybody else for that matter!